Meanings (ES + gloss)
alquimia
The premodern and early modern study of physical changes, particularly in Europe, Arabia, and China; and chiefly in pursuit of an elixir of immortality, a universal panacea, and/or a philosopher's stone able to transmute base metals into gold, eventually developing into chemistry.
And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Æsop makes the fable; that, when he died, told his sons that he had left unto them go…
The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason. The architect of modern science…
alquimia
The causing of any sort of mysterious sudden transmutation.
1640, George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum; or, Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc., in The Remains of that Sweet Singer of the Temple George Herbert, London: Pickering, 1841, p. 143,…
O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts: And that which would appear offence in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
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