George Starkey - chemistry tutor to Robert Boyle, author of immensely popular alchemical treatises, and probably early America's most important scientist - reveals through these pages the daily experimentation of a seventeenth-century alchemist.

George Starkey - chymistry tutor to Robert Boyle, author of immensely popular alchemical treatises, and probably early America's most important scientist - reveals through these pages the daily experimentation of a seventeenth-century alchemist. The editors present in this volume transcriptions of Starkey's texts, their translations, and valuable commentary for the modern reader. Dispelling the myth that alchemy was an irrational enterprise, this remarkable collection reveals the otherwise hidden methodologies of one of the seventeenth century's most influential alchemists.