#115 Speech of Alchemy

To learn the speech of alchemy, an early form of chemistry in which people attempted to turn metals into gold, it helps to think back to a time when there was no science: no atomic number or weight, no periodic chart, no list of elements. To the alchemists the [1] was not made of leptons, bosons, gluons, and quarks. Instead it was made of substances, and one substance-say, walnut oil-could be just as [2] as another—say, silver—even though modern [3] would say one is heterogeneous and the other homogeneous. Without knowledge of atomic structures, how would it be [4] to tell elements from compounds?