THE LANGUAGE OF ALCHEMY The vagueness of the general conceptions of alchemy, and the attribution of ethical qualities to material things by the alchemists, necessarily led to the employment of a language which is inexact, undescriptive, and unsuggestive to modern ears.

The same name was given to different things, and the same thing went under many names.
In Chapter IV.

I endeavoured to analyse two terms which were constantly used by the alchemists to convey ideas of great importance, the terms _Element_ and _Principle_.

That attempt sufficed, at any rate, to show the vagueness of the ideas which these terms were intended to express, and to make evident the inconsistencies between the meanings given to the words by different alchemical writers.

The story quoted in Chapter III., from Michael Sendivogius, illustrates the difficulty which the alchemists themselves had in understanding what they meant by the term _Mercury_; yet there is perhaps no word more often used by them than that.