archchemic

English

Etymology

arch- +‎ chemic

Adjective

archchemic (not comparable)

1. (rare) Of supreme chemical powers.
   • 1667, John Milton, “Book LXXXI”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 618–621:

     [...] with one vertuous touch
     Th' Arch-chimic Sun ſo farr from us remote
     Produces with Terreſtrial Humor mixt
     Here in the dark ſo many precious things

   • 1870, Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture , Volume 30, Issue 12‎^[1], Open Court Publishing Company, page 2:

     We do not propose to discuss the nature of light. Newton’s theory that light consisted of infinitesimal particles of matter, afterwards gave place to the theory that light is propagated like sound by infinitesimal waves. The spectroscope upsets all these speculations, and throws new light so to speak on sunshine. We are not quite ready to agree with Steinmetz that “light is metallic, that sunshine consists of a metallic shower, and bathes us with elementary iron, rodium, magnesium, calcium, chromium, nickel, barium, copper, and sine,” but we do agree with him that all animal and vegetable life can be traced to the “archchemic sun.”

   • a. 1892, Walt Whitman, notes (later published as Preparatory Reading and Thought)

     When the soul tells and tests by its own archchemic power.

   • 1899, Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman, Notes and Fragments‎^[2], A. Talbot & Company, page 121:

     In Metaphysical Points, here is what I guess about pure and positive truths. I guess that after all reasoning and analogy, and their most palpable demonstrations of anything, we have the real satisfaction when the soul tells and tests by its own archchemic power — superior to the learnedest proofs as one glance of living sight is more than quarto volumes of description and of maps.

   • 1901, William Hazlitt, Criticisms on Art, and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England: With Catalogues of the Principal Galleries, Now First Collected, Volume 1‎^[3], C. Templeman, page 23:

     A fine gallery of pictures is a sort of illustration of Berkeley's Theory of Matter and Spirit. It is like a palace of thought — another universe, built of air, of shadows, of colours. Every thing seems "palpable to feeling as to sight." Substances turn to shadows by the painter's archchemic touch; shadows harden into substances. " The eye is made the fool of the other senses, or else worth all the rest.'* The material is in some sense embodied in the immaterial, or, at least, we see all things in a sort of intellectual mirror.)

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “archchemic”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)