The Alchemist's Daughter Part 1

The Alchemist's Daughter.

Katharine McMahon.

CHAPTER ONE.

The Alchemist's Daughter.

[ 1 ].

True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true FIRST PRECEPT OF THE EMERALD TABLET.

IN ONE OF my earliest memories, I walk behind my father to the furnace shed. He wears a long black coat that gathers up fallen leaves, and his staff makes a little crunch when he stabs it into the path. My ap.r.o.n is so thick that my knees bang against it, and the autumn air is smoky on my face. Suddenly I trip over the hem of his coat. My nose hits ancient wool. He stops dead. My heart pounds, but I recover my balance, and we walk on.

When we reach the shed, I take a gasp of fresh air before being swallowed up. Gill is inside, shoveling coal into the arch of the furnace mouth, which roars orange.

My father's finger emerges from his sleeve and points to a metal screen Gill made for me. There is a little stool behind it, and at just the right height a couple of peepholes covered with mesh are cut into the metal. I must not move from this stool in case something spills or explodes. We are boiling up vatfuls of urine to make a thick syrup that eventually will become phosphorus. After a while the stench of sulfur and ammonia is so strong that it almost knocks me off my stool. I can't breathe properly and my throat is hot, but I hold firm and don't let my back slump. Gill is like a black shadow moving back and forth; a twist of his upper body, a jerk of the shovel, a stooping out of sight, another turn, the racket of falling coal, and then the flames roar fiercer until I think the furnace will blow apart and the shed, Selden, the woods, the world will all fly away in pieces.

But my father isn't worried, so I feel safe, too. He stands at his high desk by the door and puts his left hand to his forehead as he writes. The only bit of his face I can see under his wig is his beaky nose. This black and orange world is crammed with a million things that he knows and I don't. I want to be like him. I will be soon, if I can only pay attention and learn fast enough.

[ 2 ].

I HAVE NO memories of my mother because she is a skeleton under the earth all the time I am a child. When I was born, she died; and though I appreciate the symmetry of this, I'm not satisfied. It's hard finding out more about her because I'm not allowed to ask my father, and Mrs. Gill, who looks after me, is a woman of few words.

However, on my sixth birthday, May 30, 1712, I ask Mrs. Gill the usual questions about what my mother was like and she suddenly sighs deeply, puts down the great pot she is carrying-it is the week for brewing up the elder flowers-and takes me on a long journey through the house past the Queen's Room, through a series of little doors, and up a flight of narrow stairs until we come to a low room with a high lattice window and a sloping floor. She says, "That's where you were born."

The only furniture is a rough-looking chest and a high bed shrouded in linen, which I look at with wonder. The bed is surely too small and clean for such an untidy event as a birth. "Why?" I say.

"Because everyone has to be born somewhere."

"Why this room and not a bigger one?"

"Because it's quiet and ideal." She leans over the chest in that Mrs. Gill way of not bending her back or knees but just lowering her upper body. I go closer as she brings up the lid, and I see that the inside is lined with white paper but is otherwise nearly empty. It smells like nothing else on earth, a dusty sweetness of folded-away things. And out comes a cream-colored shawl like a spider's web, a tiny bonnet, a baby's tucked nightgown, and a coil of pink ribbon with a pin in one end to keep it rolled up. "These were your things that I made you," she says, patting the clothes, "and this was your mother's." She hands me the ribbon, which I rub and sniff. "You can have that if you like. And now those elder flowers will be boiled half dry, so down we go."

LATER SHE TELLS me the story of my parents' marriage. My mother, Emilie De Lery, was from a family of Huguenot silk weavers who had been driven out of France in 1685 and settled in a district of London called Spitalfields. Compet.i.tion in the silk market was fierce, but my grandfather De Lery decided that fas.h.i.+onable London wanted color, so he went to the Royal Society to see if he could find someone who knew about dyes.

When Grand-pere De Lery knocked at the Royal Society's door, my father, Sir John Selden, was giving a paper about the green mineral malachite. Grand-pere De Lery listened rapturously, collared my father afterward, and insisted he dine en famille in Spitalfields. There John Selden met the daughter, Emilie, twenty-two years old to his forty-nine, and his old bachelor heart was won by her dark eyes and shy smile. Within six months a new shade, De Lery green, had swamped the silk market; within a year my father had abandoned his fellows.h.i.+p at Trinity College, Cambridge, and carried Emilie off to his home, Selden Manor, in Buckinghams.h.i.+re.

Of course all that happiness didn't last long. My mother died nine months later on a May morning crowded with blossom and birdsong. She, Emilie the elder, was buried under a stone in the churchyard of St. Mary and St. Edelburga, while I, Emilie the younger, was wrapped in the cobwebby shawl and committed to the care of Mrs. Gill, housekeeper.

My father never went back to Cambridge but devoted himself to his own research and my education. Mrs. Gill said he was so sad when my mother died that he burned all her things. The pink ribbon was saved because Mrs. Gill thought I should have something as a keepsake.

[ 3 ].

UNTIL THE AGE of nineteen, I never left our estates, which included acres of woodland, a sprinkling of neglected farms, and the two villages of Selden Wick and Lower Selden.

Seldens had lived in Buckinghams.h.i.+re at least since the eleventh century, when the first Sir John Selden was buried in the north transept of the new church of St. M. and St. E. Selden Manor was a long, low patchwork of a house, part stone, part brick, part timber-framed, with wings and roofs and chimneys tacked on here and there whenever a new generation could afford to make a mark.

As an infant, I met the scuffed chair legs that had supported centuries of restless Selden backsides, and door panels pitted by the spurs of pa.s.sing boots. My fingers clutched the fat bal.u.s.ters on the staircase and traced the grooves in the carving of the family motto round the newel-post: Vide Mira Domini. It was my first Latin: Behold the wonderful works of the Lord.

By the age of five, I was eye level with the battered cuisses of a suit of armor worn by a John Selden at Bosworth-Seldens were not politicians, said my father; they always picked the losing side in a war. The groan of joints when I shook the rusty gauntlet had me squirming with pleasure, and I sucked my fingers to taste the metal. The rest of my Selden ancestry, each frozen in a portrait, had only two dimensions. Selden women were hung in the alcoves of upstairs pa.s.sageways. They had oval faces with semicircles instead of eyebrows.

"Where's my mother?" I asked Mrs. Gill.

"There was no time to have her painted."

"How long does it take to paint a portrait?"

"Too long."

"More than nine months?"

"Most like."

"If there had been a portrait, what would she have looked like?"

"Like you, of course."

Mirrors were in short supply at Selden. My father had given me a piece of polished obsidian, and if I peered in a good light I could see the shadow of my face, and there was an ancient looking gla.s.s in a disused bedchamber, where I climbed on a chair and saw distorted little features: thin nose, slanted black eyes under thick brows, hair that didn't lie flat. I translated these into one of the upstairs portraits and gave my mother a long neck, a white bosom, and jewels in her ears like the other Lady Seldens. I dressed her in silk, of course; there was a farmer's wife in church who sometimes wore black silk, and it went hush-hush like wind in the leaves, but my mother didn't wear black, oh no, she wore green, lovely s.h.i.+fting green, De Lery green to match the emeralds on her throat.

Selden men were lined up in the great hall. I liked the detail of their pleated ruffs and spindly thighs, and even better I liked the fact that they were part of me. Their eyes were elliptical and full of mystery and learning. Mrs. Gill taught me to look for a symbol inside each picture. One Selden had a globe, another a set of compa.s.ses, a third an exotic plant. These were clues to the fact that Seldens were driven by the pursuit of knowledge. Some had been explorers, others astronomers, astrologers, scholars, or plant collectors. But all Seldens had one thing in common that didn't show up in their portraits. They were puffers-or as my French mother would have said, souffleurs, dabblers in alchemy.

My father was no dabbler but a true alchemist, though he had received an orthodox education at Trinity and was fascinated by all branches of natural philosophy. He had become a fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of his expertise in minerals and investigations into the nature of fire, but still his vocation remained alchemy. Like most alchemists, he was largely self-taught, though he was in secret correspondence with other pract.i.tioners, notably his former teacher at Cambridge, Isaac Newton, now president of the Royal Society.

As he had no male heir, my father pa.s.sed on every speck of knowledge to me. Very few girls in the history of the world had been given the chances I had, he said. "You are an empty flask, and I am filling you up as fast as I can. You are my daughter, and I will make you into me, just as if you were my son. And at the end of each day, I will write down your progress, so that when you become a great alchemist, greater perhaps than Mary the Jewess, people will see how I did it. And when you lapse, I will write that down, too, and try to discover what has caused the weakness."

This Emilie Notebook of his was a source of great anxiety to me. At Selden, the written word was sacred. Ink was measured drop by drop, and paper was kept in a locked drawer. A word committed to paper was regarded as a little explosion of energy. I had access to the notebooks on plants, minerals, and alchemy, but not to the Emilie Notebooks, which he wrote after I had gone to be bed and were kept locked away in a hiding place I never saw and therefore haunted me with their ghostly authority.

[ 4 ].

TO THE WORLD beyond Selden-say to the blacksmith's daughter, brought up on the other side of the gates separating our manor house from the village-our life must have seemed very strange. Had the girl poked her head through the bars to take a closer look, she would have seen a quiet house unchanging from season to season except for varying quant.i.ties of smoke coming from the chimneys. I know we were talked about in the village because when Mrs. Gill took me to church or visiting in the cottages, people stared.

The church was named after St. Edelburga, a saint so fond of books that she'd built an entire abbey so that her niece could be educated in it. A window in the side chapel had a stained gla.s.s picture of Edelburga, who had black brows like my own and therefore, I presumed, my mother's. The Selden pew was at the front under the pulpit, so I had an excellent view of Reverend Gilbert's chin and nostrils and was expert at dodging a spray of spittle. After the service, his damp fingers clung to my hand as I argued some point in his sermon. My father and I did not believe in the Trinity. Only G.o.d was G.o.d, not Jesus and not the Holy Spirit, whereas Gilbert preached the "three in one." Meanwhile, everyone else hung about and listened. At the time, I thought it was because they were amazed at how much I knew. Actually, I must have been an odd little black-haired, pale-faced thing, full of long words but no girlish charm.

Sometimes church made me sad because I couldn't help but notice that most other children had mothers. The blacksmith's wife held a baby against her shoulder and another on her hip as she thrust her way down the aisle with the rest of her brood tagging onto her skirts. What was it like, I wondered, to have a mother who let you plait her hair, kept crusts in her pocket in case you were peckish, hauled you off the gritty floor if you fell, kissed your tearful face, and let you play with her string of blue beads?

My own mother was in a corner of the churchyard. Sometimes Mrs. Gill and I went and had a look at her grave. My anatomical education was such that I could picture the arrangement of her bones and the hollow of her pelvis, wide enough for my baby head to slide through, but there was no reaching her. I was very critical of my mother's grave. All the other Seldens were under slabs in the church or had grand memorials in the wall. The Bosworth Selden even had a tomb on which his stone replica lay with a sword at his side and a book in his hand. Some Selden women had little oval plaques like afterthoughts, but at least they were inside out of the rain. "So why is she out here?" I asked Mrs. Gill.

"Lord knows. I suppose because she loved the fresh air."

But I knew there was no fresh air under the ground. I had scooped up handfuls of earth and discovered that it smelled of cellars and tasted of coal. I had watched a fat worm writhe across my palm. "Was she wearing a silk dress when you buried her?" I asked Mrs. Gill.

"What a waste that would have been," she said.

And then it was time to go home past villagers huddled in groups, nodding and smiling. I thought they envied me. I thought every girl in the village must want to be me and spend her days as I did, distilling and calcifying and learning the myriad qualities of sulfur, the works of Maier and Paracelsus, and the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine. Anyway, I was usually too busy, too fascinated by the dramas of our investigations, to pay much attention to the world beyond. My vision was so filled with books and fermentations and hypotheses that I had no time for the study of human beings other than of their anatomy and the circulation of their blood.

SELDEN MANOR WAS the crucible in which my father, the Gills, and I lived together. I peer into it now with the respectful caution with which I was taught to approach any volatile experiment. I am searching for a day to ill.u.s.trate our life before 1725, the year when everything changed. And unlike the blacksmith's daughter, I am an expert in observation. I know what I am looking for-bubbles of gas, a rise in temperature, an alteration in texture-small indications of chemical change that mean something significant is happening.

[ 5 ].

IT IS OCTOBER 1721. I am fifteen, and my father and I are at the very beginning of our phlogiston phase. I wake at dawn, and the room smells of the spicy woods outside. The clock in the church tower is striking six, which means I am late. I leap out of bed and crouch over the chamber pot. We are still very interested in urine at Selden. Gill uses it to fertilize his wife's herbal beds and as a moistening agent in the making of cement linings for alchemical vessels, which have to withstand intense heat.

Next I examine my body for smallpox symptoms. A week ago my father told me that he had discovered a method that would protect me from ever having the disease. "I shall engraft you with the pus taken from the pox of a child with a very mild form of the smallpox. You will probably feel unwell, but that's all. Afterward you will be safe forever from the infection. This is a method that I saw tried last year on six condemned convicts. Each was inoculated with the disease, recovered, and pardoned. I shall offer the same treatment to anyone in the village who wishes to accept." He made me roll up my sleeve, scratched my skin with a needle, and dropped a yellowish liquid from a phial onto the wound. My arm felt sore afterward but nothing worse has happened yet.

Once I've established that I don't have the smallpox, I put on a bunchy woolen dress sewn by Mrs. Gill, then a canvas ap.r.o.n. When I have stuffed my hair into a cap, I am ready to make the journey to the kitchen, where my breakfast is on the table.

Mrs. Gill and I grunt to each other. She has staring eyes, a lumpy nose, and thin pink skin stretched tight over her cheeks and forehead. She smells of cotton, pastry, sweat, and above all her own cottage tang of fermenting herbs and dried flower heads. She is not only housekeeper at Selden, but also the local midwife and herbalist. I wasn't very pleased when I first realized this. I thought she was mine, that her hands existed only for my needs, to force my face down into the washbowl, to cook my dinners, to empty my chamber pot, and that the reason for her cottage was so that I could go there when my father was angry or away. But I am old enough now to be reconciled to her dual life. Besides, I don't need her much anymore.

The household is still running to its autumn timetable and I have to be in the laboratory by half past six, so I set off again in my lisping felt slippers back along the flagged pa.s.sageway to the quiet chambers at the front of the house: the screens pa.s.sage, the hall, and the library, which is an anteroom to the laboratory. On the far side, a brocade curtain, double thickness, hangs over a door. Inside is a little cavity then yet another door, which opens inward to the laboratory.

I close it softly behind me. Sunlight streams through the lattices of a two-story bay window and the air is dancing with gold dust. Now that I am back, it feels as if the hours I have spent away have been wasted time. I am at the hub of the world and am filled up with excitement and dread.

My father is at his desk, and his wig, a vast, fuzzy affair, already hangs on the back of his chair. It helps him think and is worn so that it can be s.n.a.t.c.hed off when he gets excited. He is sixty-three, but he still has lots of silver hair, which he strokes from time to time with his left hand. He takes up very little s.p.a.ce but burns so fiercely that he has only to lift a finger for everything to change. I think of him as the sun and me as a little planet held in place by the force of his intellect.

He is writing a paper for the Royal Society ent.i.tled The Nature of Fire. n.o.body on earth knows what fire is or even whether it is a state or a substance. My father has been in correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton, who suggests that fire is caused by a vibration of the ethereal medium in hot bodies, but we don't like this explanation because we can't prove it.

I sit at my desk, which is pushed up close under my father's, and open the tract he has given me to read: Robert Boyle's New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects. I already know about Boyle's investigations into the vacuum and his a.n.a.lysis of air, but I don't mind the repet.i.tion because I am fascinated by anything to do with air and fire.

As I read, I am alert to what else is happening in the laboratory. I hear the tick of our three clocks-we measure everything accurately, including time-and the scuffles of mice in their cages. My father is breathing heavily, particularly when he inhales, and his pen squeaks. I can smell ancient wool and tobacco. Beyond him the room flies away, filled with things I know as intimately as my own hands.

A late-fifteenth-century Selden who loved praying-very unusual for our family-built this room as a chapel, but his son had other ideas and knocked out the walls and ceilings to make a laboratory. There's plenty to distract me: large and small furnaces, benches, shelves, barrels, vats, boxes, a globe, barometers, scales, a variety of bellows, and receptacles of every shape-retorts, cucurbits, crucibles, and alembics. We use some of these things every day; others are too rare and precious except for the most advanced stages of alchemy.

The latest member of our little menagerie is a barn owl that Gill found in the attic. She had hurt her wings by das.h.i.+ng them against the window frame. He thinks she is one of a pair that nests in the church tower. We keep her in the laboratory while she recovers so that we can study her habits, though the mice aren't happy because we feed them to her one by one. I can just see her from my desk. She seems to be asleep.

I read a bit more about Boyle's corpuscular theory of matter. Boyle used his vacuum pump to test the possibility that there is a substance called ether that fills up the s.p.a.ces between corpuscles of air, of the type described by M. Descartes . . .

The owl has opened her black eyes. She stares at me. I stare back.

"Emilie." I jump. "Repeat the line you have just read."

I can't. I have been lost in the owl's gaze.

"Your concentration is very poor. Why is that?"

"The owl, I suppose."

"You were a better scholar when you were five. You are slipping."

"Slipping, Father?"

"I'll make a note in the book."

The clocks strike the half hour. He blots his work, takes off his spectacles, and puts on his wig, which shrinks his face until he is all nose and glinting eyes. "Gill tells me we should release the owl," he says. "We'll take her up to the roof after supper."

He has taught me that it is wrong to have feelings for any animal, so I say nothing. The owl has closed her eyes "Phlogiston," he says. "New heading, Emilie. Today we will replicate Mayow's experiment with gases as described in the Tractatus Quinque Medico-Physici." His voice, like everything else about him, is worn thin. I spring into action, though I am still hurt about the owl.

In the laboratory, we are always on the way to somewhere else, and I struggle to keep up. My nerves are on edge. Not only must I take in all that my father teaches me about what he already knows, but I must also keep abreast of our new experiments. I have to antic.i.p.ate, predict, and hypothesize. Alchemy takes up less than six months of the year, and in all the rest of our work we follow Sir Isaac Newton's experimental method rigorously. I must not break things. I must not say anything foolish. I must not forget what I have already been taught. I must not ask stupid questions. Above all, I mustn't cry. If I do any of these things, my father will be angry, and then he doesn't speak. Depending on the offense, the silence can last for hours or even days while he sits at his desk with his forehead in the fingertips of his left hand until he is ready to write what I've done in the notebook.

He is just back from his annual visit to London. Each year, he spends four weeks there so he can buy the latest books and equipment and give or listen to papers at the Royal Society, where he is thought to be a very great person. At the moment he is full of news, not only about inoculating the smallpox, but about a Bavarian, Georg Stahl, and phlogiston. Thanks to Stahl, we now have to rework all our experiments on the nature of fire to see if the phlogiston theory works.

We suspend a little platform holding camphor over a lighted candle placed in a trough of water, and invert a gla.s.s bulb over the top. I use a siphon to draw off the air inside the bulb until the water levels are even inside and outside, then carefully pull out the siphon tube. As we expect, the candle goes on burning for a while, then flickers and dies. The water level inside the flask rises. Stahl says the candle goes out because the air has become phlogisticated, packed with the substance phlogiston-from the Greek phlogistos-to have been set on fire-released by the burning wax.

Then I take the experiment to the window and try to ignite the camphor by using a magnifying gla.s.s to concentrate the rays of the sun. It won't burn because, according to Stahl, the air in the gla.s.s is already full of phlogiston. My father grips the workbench. He is excited by this new theory of fire and makes little popping noises with his lips. His hands are covered by the sleeves of his topcoat, which is of a thick, dark-gray worsted, s.h.i.+ny at the elbow and rear. It has a deep collar and sags beyond his knees at the front and almost to the floor at the back. Underneath he wears an a.s.sortment of waistcoats, s.h.i.+rts, and breeches, all in colors between brown and gray. His mouth is pulled inward, the lower lip tucked under the upper-it's got stuck like that because of the thousands of pipes he's smoked-and his eyes are fixed on the candle.

My father says, "I believe there is something in this phlogiston theory that may shed all kinds of light on the behavior of metals when heated or burned. We will next try the same experiment on sulfur, iron, and lead. Make a list." He pulls off his wig, throws it on the bench, puts it back on his head.

I write what he dictates, but I am not happy with the idea of phlogiston. I think that the results of our experiment support Stahl's theory to an extent but don't prove it. I wish we could catch the air inside the gla.s.s and do more experiments to see how it really differs in quality from what Stahl would call the dephlogisticated air around us, but I say nothing of this to my father. I do as he says, and after a while I feel peaceful again. I love the flow of ink from my pen, the smells of sulfur and camphor, dusty wig and tobacco, and the satisfaction of watching an experiment go as predicted. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that my father's hands are trembling more than ever and that after a little while his knees sag and he perches on a stool.

At one o'clock, I go back to the kitchen for my dinner. My father eats alone in the dining parlor and then rests while I study.

[ 6 ].

IN THE LATE afternoon, we go outside to learn about the natural world. My father wears a tricorn hat pressed firmly down on his wig and a trailing cloak that flattens the gra.s.s. We both have stout boots sent from Buckingham, and I carry a leather satchel and a jar with a cork lid in case we find anything of interest. His staff has a plain bra.s.s handle, and he waves it in front of him as if he needs to push aside the air. He walks too slowly for me, and I rein myself back to keep one step behind.

We have embarked on the collection and cla.s.sification of tiny organisms-creatures that can only be seen through the lens of our latest microscope, an instrument so precious that I'm afraid even to nudge it with my eyelid. We come to a round pond within a dank circle of trees, and I scoop up a sample. A transparent shrimp coils in the muddy water. "Chirocephalus," I say.

The water shakes when my father holds the jar. "Tell me, Emilie, what we can expect to see when we place this creature under the lens?"

But suddenly I don't care. I think of the hours I'll have to spend drawing and labeling the wretched little shrimp, and I want to smash the jar against a stone. I see the tiny creature cling to the gla.s.s and think I can make out its sootlike speck of an eye.

"I'm sorry, Father." I rub my belly with my hand. "I believe that I am . . . I must." He gives me a cold look and turns away. There is an unspoken understanding that my growing female body has functions I may not discuss with him, and I know he disapproves.

I run, cras.h.i.+ng through the trees to the oak that Gill taught me to climb. I hitch my skirts, clamber up as if it were a ladder, straddle a branch, and watch the leaves rise and fall above me. Each one is dappled with the shadow of another. A shaft of suns.h.i.+ne warms my wrist and I think about heat. Is it a state or a substance? How is it pa.s.sed from one object, the sun, to another, my arm?

The wind stirs the leaves. There is movement in the air. The air moves. Air is not a state but a substance.

The pa.s.sage of blood through my veins beats in my ears. I grow calm. I belong in the tree, the greenwoods at Selden, on the twirling planet as it makes its elliptical journey round the sun. I am Emilie, part of the plan. But as I sway in the tree, I think about the shrimp and how my father controls my knowledge and every movement of my day. I want to know much more than he will ever tell me. Each year, I beg to be taken to London, so I can hear more music than the dissonant chords in the church organ and the thin piping of the minstrels at the annual fair. I want to know what people look like in other worlds than mine, but he won't show me them. And above all I want to know about that other woman, my mother, who bled and had b.r.e.a.s.t.s and soft inner thighs like mine. The older I get, the more I long to see her. Just one glimpse of her face, brush of her skirts, or whisper of her voice would do. I am no longer satisfied with fantasies of her. But if I ask about her, my father turns his head away, and there's the end to it.

[ 7 ].

IN THE EVENING, when my father and I eat supper together by the library fire, the torment of the afternoon is forgotten. Afterward, I kneel by his chair to fill his pipe. He takes a leather pouch from his pocket and gives it to me-the leather, still warm, is old and crisscrossed with wrinkles like his skin, but the tobacco inside is moist and fragrant. I pinch it up with my finger and thumb and drop a few strands into the bowl of the pipe.

"Well, Emilie."

"Well, Father, I have been thinking about the phlogiston theory in the light of Boyle's investigations and our own experiments today."

His eyes go warm. The little breaths he huffs through his nose are the closest he comes to a chuckle. I must not waste a single flake of tobacco, so I take my time with the pipe. "On the one hand, Stahl's theory is beautifully simple because it allows us to accept the ancient view that air is a fixed state, a constant. Our experiment supported Stahl's theory. Phlogiston is released from the candle wax during combustion until the air can take no more. Later, when we tried to ignite a piece of camphor we couldn't, though we know that the camphor would have caught fire outside the flask because camphor is highly combustible, or, as Stahl would say, rich in phlogiston."

He doesn't take his eyes from my face as I light a taper from the fire, hand him his pipe, and watch him suck until the tobacco catches.

"But I am still not ready to discount Mayow and Boyle. Mayow says the flame goes out because nitro-aerial particles are used up from the air-what Boyle would call ether-and though plenty of air remains in the flask, it is these particles that are needed for combustion."