Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references.

Practical Chemistry: Mining, Metallurgy and War -- Spiritual and Allegorical Alchemy and Chemistry -- Medicines, Purges, and Ointments -- An Emerging Science -- The Chemical Revolution -- A Young Democracy and a New Chemistry -- Chemistry Begins to Specialize, Systemize, and Help the Farm and the Factory -- Teaching Chemistry to the Masses -- Chemistry Enters the Modern Age -- Some Brief Chemical Amusements.

Chemistry has perhaps the most intricate, most fascinating, and certainly most romantic history of all the sciences. Arthur Greenberg's essays-delightful, learned, quirky, highly personal, and richly illustrated with contemporary drawings (many of great rarity and beauty)-provide a kaleidoscope of intellectual landscapes, bringing the experiments, the ideas, and the human figures of chemistry's past intensely alive