One key alchemical experiment was called the Tree of Diana, a magical-looking demonstration that metals could grow like vegetation. Newman learned
that the Tree of Diana really works. “If you immerse a solid amalgam of silver and mercury in nitric acid with dissolved silver and mercury, you
produce tiny, twiglike branches of solid silver,” he says. Today this process is regarded as a simple matter of chemistry. But to Newton, the Tree
of Diana was evidence that metals could be made to grow and, therefore, “possessed a sort of life.”
The image of the growing metallic tree can be found in another type of experiment, one that Starkey, Boyle, and very likely Newton all conducted: the
attempt to synthesize the Philosophers’ Stone. Principe, who had studied the alchemical work of all three men, came to the same conclusion as Newman
and decided that he, too, had to replicate the long-abandoned alchemical experiments firsthand. He culled recipes from alchemists like Starkey and,
after “a lengthy process involving various materials and numerous distillations,” obtained Philosophical Mercury, just as Boyle had 350 years
earlier. Principe mixed the Philosophical Mercury with gold, sealed it in a glass egg, and watched. Just as Starkey and other alchemists reported,
strange things started to happen inside the egg. The mixture began to bubble, rising “like leavened dough,” Principe says. Then it turned pasty
and liquid and, after several days of heating, transformed into what he likens to a “dendritic fractal”: another metallic tree, like the trees the
miners saw underground, only this one was made of gold and mercury.
|
The tree was not the original! The website which collects Newton's writings looks
interesting: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1 
. He is the one who can really put a big question mark in my mind, and doing so by simple experiments.
