To a person whose experience has never been brought into relation with the object sulphur, the name signifies nothing; to the scientist... his concep… - J. R. Partington

The Chinese early learned to work in metals; bronze occurs in the 11th-10th centuries B.C., useful iron from about 500 B.C. At a later period they made brass... True porcelain was first made about A.D. 600. They were probably in possession of mercury at an early date, and learnt how to decompose cinnabar into mercury and sulphur, and recompose it from these materials.

We find Theophrastus (315 B.C.) describing... the manufacture of white lead... "lead is placed in an earthen vessel over sharp vinegar, and after it has acquired some thickness of a kind of rust... they open the vessels and scrape it off. ...repeating over and over again... til it is wholly gone. What has been scraped off they then beat to a powder and boil with water for a long time, and what at last settles to the bottom is white lead.

From the time when Guldberg and Waage gave quantitative form to the speculations of the physicist Berthollet, a clear conception of chemical equilibrium, in sharp contrast to an anthropomorphic theory of affinity dating back to Hippocrates and Barchausen, has yielded rich and abundant fruit.