ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Duclos's analyses of the The Origin of Forms and Qualities (OFQ) and the Certain Physiological Essays (CPE), especially the 'physico-chymical essay, containing an experiment with some considerations touching the differing parts and red integration of salt-petre' and parts of the 'two essays, concerning the unsuccessfulness of experiments'. Duclos's chymical principles were closely linked to experimental demonstration. The chapter examines the CPE was Duclos's most systematic and comprehensive treatment of Boyle's work, but it was not the only one. Recent scholarship has improved our understanding of the complexities of the SC, a multi-layered polemical manifesto that announced and generated a crisis in seventeenth-century chymistry. Duclos was hardly impressed with Boyle's apology, which he considered duplicitous and unacceptable. Duclos drew unmistakable parallels between Boyle's mysterious salt and a similar substance and extraction procedure reported by the German pharmacist Johan Schrader in his Quercetanus redivivus, hoc est, Ars medica dogmaticohermetica.
