Employees of the American Chemical Heritage Foundation received a method for making "philosophical mercury." The website of the foundation informs about the acquisition from a private collector of a document of the 17th century, written by the hand of Isaac Newton, which describes the conduct of alchemical experiments.
"The manufacture of [philosophical] mercury for the [philosophical] stone from antimony, Mars and the Moon (in alchemy stellar bodies corresponded to metals: iron to Mars, and silver to the Moon) according to the manuscripts of the American alchemist," which Newton was guided by is a well-known document George Starkey, who was hiding under the pseudonym Eirenei Filalet. “As it was supposed, philosophical mercury had to separate some metals into their constituents to create others. This process was necessary to obtain the Philosopher's Stone, which the alchemists believed could turn any metal into gold,”explains James Woolkel of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
According to the researchers, Newton may have used Starkey's text to conduct his own alchemical experiments. The acquired document describes the production of volatile vapors from lead ore, which, according to the staff of the foundation, was one of the stages of alchemical experiments in Newton's interpretation. Nevertheless, it is not known for certain about the attempts of the greatest scientist to create a philosopher's stone: nothing is said about this in Newton's laboratory records, which are stored in Cambridge.
For a more extensive study of the received text, the Chemical Heritage Foundation plans to include it in the online project "Chemistry of Isaac Newton", which is overseen by the University of Indiana.