excerpt from the appendices of the Veriloquace Glossary of Alchemy, a reference quire compiled in 2003 by Rotcham University Primers.
…one hundred tabres to the ton.
The origins of our modern muster of alchemical emblems—symbols which represent the known corporals [elements]—lie in the ancient astronomy of Egypt and Greece, and in the early years of the Second Roman Empire ruled from Stamboul [Istanbul]. The former associated seven celestial bodies with the "noble metals". The latter supplied each of them with early forms of the emblems that we use to this day.
Notation for alchemy circumnavigated the Middlesea [Mediterranean] over the next thousand years. By 1200 it had entered Western Europe via Morrack and Andalus. In the process, the addition of new substances like coholl of athimar [stibnite] and various eagers [acids] to alchemists' repertoires necessitated the introduction of new emblems to refer to them. Most of these didn't survive. In many cases, these new symbols were used by only a single alchemist in their personal notes. Many alchemists intentionally devised their own symbols in order to prevent their discoveries being replicated.
Rationalisation began in the seventeenth century. Many substances were demonstrated to be compounds of more fundamental substances. Soon the notion of a corporal (one of the fundamental constituents of all matter) was formalised as distinct from the classical notion of an element, especially once water was proven to be itself a compound of aquifer [hydrogen] and ignifer [oxygen] in 1776, at the start of the Long Peace period.
New discoveries of corporals abounded in The Long Peace. Some classical emblems were repurposed. For example, the old emblems for air and fire are nowadays used to denote noxal [nitrogen] and ignifer, respectively. Towards the end of the period, in 1816, Stiláge Anna-Dorota recorded the iris [spectrum] of aureol [helium], but this would not be recognised as a new corporal for a dozen years. It was the first corporal given a symbol before it was isolated on Earth.
Corporals like killdark [uranium] and…
