Science historians are too scathing about the achievements of alchemy. They dismiss it as a blind alley verging on lunacy, at best irrelevant to and at worst an impediment to the development of modern chemistry. This is the contention of William Newman, professor of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University (see also New Scientist, 8 April, p 47). He maintains that alchemists, especially the 17th-century Robert Boyle, provided proof of atoms and therefore laid the foundations of the contemporary science. Newman shows immense scholarship in this book: even its long introduction is loaded with extensive footnotes. The lay reader is confronted with a strenuous task, complicated by coping with the precise meaning of ancient words while travelling into rarefied levels of academe, and is likely to find it tough going.
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