Speech of Alchemy

To learn the speech of alchemy, an early form of chemistry in which people attempted to [blank] 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 [blank] , 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 [blank] as another-say, silver-even though modern [blank] would say one is heterogeneous and the other homogeneous. Without knowledge of atomic structures-how would it be [blank] to tell elements from compounds?