the act of changing one substance into another.

Nature, says Sir Isaac Newton, is delighted with transmutation: water, which is a fluid, volatile, tasteless, salt, is, by heat, transmuted into vapour, which is a kind of air; and by cold into ice, which is a cold, transparent, brittle stone, easily dissolvable; and this stone is convertible again into water by heat, as vapour is by cold.—Earth, by heat, becomes fire, and, by cold, is turned into earth again: dense bodies, by fermentation, are rarefied into various kinds of air; and that air, by fermentation also, and sometimes without it, reverts into gross bodies. All bodies, beasts, fishes, insects, plants, &c. with all their various parts, grow and increase out of water and aqueous and saline tinctures; and, by putrefaction, all of them revert into water, or an aqueous liquor again.

in alchemy, denotes the act of changing imperfect metals into gold or silver. This is also called the grand operation; and, they say, it is to be effected with the philosopher's stone.

The trick of transmuting cinnabar into silver is thus: the cinnabar, being bruised grossly, is stratified in a crucible with granulated silver, and the crucible placed in a great fire; and, after due time for calcination, taken off; then the matter, being poured out, is found to be cinnabar Traumata-cinnabar turned into real silver, though the silver grains appear in the same number and form as when they were put into the crucible; but the mischief is, coming to handle the grains of silver, you find them nothing but light friable bladders which will crumble to pieces between the fingers.

The transmutability of water into earth seems to have been believed by Mr Boyle; and Bishop Watson thinks that it has not yet been disproved. See his Chemical Essays.

TRANSMUTATION of Acids, or of Metals, is the change of one acid or of one metal into another.