 Renaissance alchemy, as much as the reworking of ancient Greek atomist theories by adherents of the ‘New Science’ of the seventeenth century, proved important sources of inspiration for corpuscularian theories in the early modern world (Newman 2006). The Aristotelian notion of minima naturalia, and the appeal to microstructures of matter in explanation of chemical changes in Aristotle’s Meteorology IV, meant that consideration of corpuscularian explanations need not automatically be framed as a rejection of Aristotle. A useful corrective here to the tendency to regard early modern atomism as merely reviving ancient Greek theories is Newman’s argument that an ‘operational’ notion of minima—the smallest unit that seems to be manifest in the best explanation of the observed phenomena—emerged from the alchemical tradition and provided an alternative to the metaphysical arguments of the ancient Greek atomists (Newman 2006, 2009).