Significantly, it was at this same time—the first decades of the eighteenth century—that the words alchemy and chemistry took on new and more restricted meanings. Previously, the two words had coexisted and remained largely interchangeable. Even when some distinction in their usage from that period is detectable, it is not consistent and only rarely the one automatically made today. For example, Andreas Libavius’s famous 1597 book, titled simply Alchemia, describes how to perform chemical operations, use laboratory equipment, and make an array of chemical preparations—in short, what we would
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