The Long-Desired and Promised Chemical-Philosophical Touchstone

Preface.

I have endeavored, in the biographies which I now present to the public, to explain the history of the men I have described through the history of their time, and the latter in turn through the former; a method I shall also observe in the following essays. A series of selected biographies of famous scholars from the times of the restoration of the sciences A term used by 18th-century writers to describe the Renaissance and the revival of classical learning. will perhaps teach us to know the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries better than a pragmatic history A style of history writing that seeks to explain the causes and consequences of events to provide practical lessons for the present, rather than just listing dates. of the re-enlightenment of our Europe, because in such a history, one could not go into such precise detail as one can and may do in biographies. Furthermore, a pragmatic history of the restoration of the sciences is infinitely difficult, because even the largest libraries never possess all the works of those men whose writings provide important data for the state of enlightenment in their