This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to scorn.

Modern chemistry is nothing more than that.

It is much, and yet little,--much, because the science has never recoiled before difficulty; little, in comparison with what remains to be done.

Chance has served her well, my noble Science! Is not that tear of crystallized pure carbon, the diamond, seemingly the last substance possible to create?
The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond.

Yet we have discovered the nature and the law of its composition.
"'As for me,' he continued, 'I have gone farther still.