 Boyle’s scientific range was wide. Besides his well known work in mechanics, medicine, hydrostatics (Chalmers 2017, chap. 8) and a wide variety of experiments with his vacuum pump, he was interested both theoretically and practically in alchemy (see Principe 1998, Clericuzio 2000, Newman and Principe 2002), where his interest seems to have been fueled more by his constant desire to acquire knowledge of God and the world than by any desire for riches. He “cultivated Chymistry with a disinterested mind,” seeking the improvement of his own knowledge, “the gratifying the Curious &amp; the Industrious; and the Acquist of some useful helps to make good &amp; uncommon  Medicins.”[4]  As a corpuscularian he believed that transmutation was physically possible. As a person he believed that it actually occurred. He believed that in his own laboratory gold had been transmuted into a “baser metal” with a specific gravity about two thirds of that of gold, and since he was, he said, more interested in the luciferous aspect of discovery than the lucriferous, he found the process equally interesting in either  direction.[5]