They made the great mistake of fashioning _The One Thing, The Essence, The Water of Paradise_, from their own imaginings of what nature ought to be.

In their own likeness they created their goal, and the road to it.
If we are to understand nature, they cried, her ways must be simple; therefore, her ways are simple.

Chemists are people of a humbler heart.

Their reward has been greater than the alchemists dreamed.

By selecting a few instances of material changes, and studying these with painful care, they have gradually elaborated a general conception of all those transformations wherein substances are produced unlike those by the interaction of which they are formed.