The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists. ...The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em.] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.' The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals

The Greek chemical treatises contain... a great amount of practical chemical information... fusion, calcination, solution, filtration, crystallization, sublimation and especially distillation; and methods of heating include the open fire, lamps, and the sand and water baths. Nearly all this practical knowledge... the Arabs... derived... from the very source we are now considering.

The Turba Philosophorum is indisputably the most ancient extant treatise on Alchemy in the Latin tongue, but it was not, so far as can be ascertained, originally written in Latin; the compiler or editor, for in many respects it can scarcely be regarded as an original composition, wrote either in Hebrew or Arabic; however, the work, not only at the present day, but seemingly during the six or seven centuries when it was quoted as an authority by all the alchemical adepts, has been familiar only in its Latin garb. (preface)

Alchemy posed as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came into its own when substances had shed their sacred attributes.

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

[M]ediaeval ...alchemy, astrology, witchcraft. ...Do we now know how the stars influence human lives or how witches turn milk blue? Not in the least. We have learnt to look upon the facts themselves as unreal, as vain imaginings of the untrained human mind; we have learnt that they could not be described scientifically because they involved notions which were in themselves contradictory and absurd. ...So soon as science entered the field of alchemy with a true classification and a true method, alchemy was converted into chemistry and became an important branch of human knowledge.

The Alexandrian chemists were very near to a recognition of gases.

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide according to Gatterman was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very different from following Artusi's recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo the truths revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. Did chemistry theorems exist? No; therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans or magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West – Archimedes and Euclid.

Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend ‘the One, the All’. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites.

He <nowiki>[</nowiki>Apollonius of Perga<nowiki>]</nowiki> spent a very long time with the pupils of Euclid at Alexandria, and it was thus that he acquired such a scientific habit of thought.

Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.

Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous scientific formation; a formation half chimerical and half positive, itself founded on the treasure slowly amassed by the practical discoveries of metallurgy, medicine, industry, and domestic economy. It has to do with alchemy, which pretended to enrich its adepts by teaching them to manufacture gold and silver, to shield them from diseases by the preparation of the , and finally to obtain for them perfect felicity by identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit.

Another feature of Alexandrian algebra is the absence of any explicit deductive structure. The various types of numbers... were not defined. Nor was there any axiomatic basis on which a deductive structure could be erected. The work of Heron, Nichomachus, and Diophantus, and of Archimedes as far as his arithmetic is concerned, reads like the procedural texts of the Egyptians and Babylonians... The deductive, orderly proof of Euclid and Apollonius, and of Archimedes' geometry is gone. The problems are inductive in spirit, in that they show methods for concrete problems that presumably apply to general classes whose extent is not specified. In view of the fact that as a consequence of the work of the classical Greeks mathematical results were supposed to be derived deductively from an explicit axiomatic basis, the emergence of an independent arithmetic and algebra with no logical structure of its own raised what became one of the great problems of the history of mathematics. This approach to arithmetic and algebra is the clearest indication of the Egyptian and Babylonian influences... Though the Alexandrian Greek algebraists did not seem to be concerned about this deficiency... it did trouble deeply the European mathematicians.