The Names of Alchemy — from before modern chemistry and Lavoisier’s modern chemical nomenclature — obviously couldn’t reference the various compounds’ elemental components. You can’t name something carbon dioxide until you know what carbon and oxygen are, and that carbon dioxide is composed of one atom of carbon combined with two atoms of oxygen.
Some examples:
the green lion (iron sulphate) — a typical term from alchemy, which was never concerned to make its recipes and references too clear.spirit of salt (hydrochloric acid) — because it was made from salt.
butter of antimony (antimony trichloride) — because of its waxy quality.
flower of zinc (zinc oxide) — found as a deposit in zinc chimneys. “Flower” means “flour” here; the words are etymologically the same.
spirit of hartshorn (acqueous ammonia) — a perfectly straightforward name; it was distilled from harts’ horns! The same substance derived from another and less attractive process was called volatile salt of urine. There was also salt of hartshorn (smelling salts) narcotic salt of vitriol (boric acid) — made from (green) vitriol, another name for iron sulphate, not to be confused with blue vitriol, or copper sulphate.
fixed air (carbon dioxide); it got that name because it’s denser than regular air, so it settles to the bottom of your container and doesn’t mix with other gases.
regulus of antimony — A regulus (‘little king’) was the heavy substance that sank to the bottom of your crucible. ‘Antimony’ then referred to kohl (antimony trisulphide), regulus of antimony thus referred to the pure metal isolated from kohl — what we now call antimony.
sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) — because it was made from camel dung from the Temple of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt.
bismuth glance (bismuth sulphide) — a glance was apparently a shiny substance.
acqua regia ‘kingly water’, a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids, which could dissolve gold lunar caustic, sticks of silver nitrate used in surgery; ‘luna’ was an old alchemical term for silver.