Alchemy Speech

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 universe 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 pure as another-say, silver-even though modern scientists would say one is heterogeneous and the other homogeneous. Without knowledge of atomic structure how would it be possible to tell elements from compounds?