Transmutation

He learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed (there was, in some degree, but the grammarian did not recognize it), but that every word in both Latin and Greek was to be individually committed to memory at the cost of years of plodding.

Charles Darwin’s personal life was also expanding. In eighteen thirty-nine, he married Emma Wedgwood, his cousin. He told her his ideas about how species evolve over time — what he called the transmutation of species.

Up I rose and forth I fared: / Took my plunge within the bath-pool, pacified the watch-dog scared, / Saw proceed the transmutation—Jura's black to one gold glow, […]

The transmutation of metals was secondary to the main aim, which was the spiritual transformation of the adept.

Years later, scientists learned that the sun’s light—visible and invisible—is merely the by-product of a process alchemists had vainly tried to reproduce for centuries—the transmutation of one element into another. That nature accomplishes this before our very eyes, and that it is what creates the solar heat and light that supports all life, was suspected by no one. The revelation came as a complete surprise.