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Not that his countrymen can be charged with being insensible of his excellencies, till other nations taught them to admire him; for, in 1718, he was chosen to succeed Le Mort in the professorship of chymistry; on which occasion he pronounced an oration, "De chemia errores suos expurgante," in which he treated that science with an elegance of style not often to be found in chymical writers, who seem generally to have affected, not only a barbarous, but unintelligible phrase, and to have, like the Pythagoreans of old, wrapt up their secrets in symbols and enigmatical expressions, either because they believed that mankind would reverence most what they least understood, or because they wrote not from benevolence, but vanity, and were desirous to be praised for their knowledge, though they could not prevail upon themselves to communicate it.
A commentator on Aristotle, writing in the 4th century A.D., calls certain instruments used for fusion and calcination "chuika organa," that is, instruments for melting and pouring. Hence, probably, came the adjective chyic or chymic, and, at a somewhat later time, the word chemia as the name of that art which deals with calcinations, fusions, meltings, and the like.
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