SOURCES OF QUOTATIONS

• Page 1–2, “generous good nature of tin”: Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1986), 188.
• Page 2, “attitude of dignified abstention”: ibid., 4.
• Page 4, “I can appreciate the beauty of a flower”: Richard Feynman, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, BBC documentary (1981).
• Page 4, “There is grandeur in this view of life”: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 490.
• Page 32, “The first day it was my fate”: Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1986), 33–34.
• Page 32, “At that moment between Rita and myself”: ibid., 35.
• Page 32, “My zinc sulfate ended up badly”: ibid., 36.
• Page 45, “formative faculty”: Johannes Kepler, De nive sexangula (1611), trans. Colin Hardie as The Six-Cornered Snowflake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 33.
• Page 45, “she knows and is practiced”: ibid., 43.
• Page 57, “rock crystal”: Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 10, trans. D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), Book 37, Ch. 9.
• Page 64, “a new compound of mine”: David Jones, “Black Crystal Arts,” Chemistry World, 31 July 2012.
• Page 69, “empty the haunted air”: John Keats, “Lamia” (1820), Part 2.
• Page 80, “Distilling is beautiful”: Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1986), 57–58.
• Page 116, “Among these myriads of enchanting little stars”: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 480.
• Page 116, “Who carved the nucleus”: Johannes Kepler, De nive sexangula (1611), trans. Colin Hardie as The Six-Cornered Snowflake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 23.
• Page 123, “Formative reason does not act only for a purpose”: ibid., 33.
• Page 123, “guided the aqueous particles”: T. H. Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” Fortnightly Review 5 (1869): 129.
• Page 123, “The beauty of a snow-crystal depends”: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 696–697.
• Page 155, “Nature is an endless combination”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Essays (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1841), 13.
• Page 162, “There is no better, there is no more open door”: Michael Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle, ed. Frank A. J. L. James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.
• Page 187, “When the wax travels up the wick”: P. W. Atkins, Atoms, Electrons, and Change (New York: Scientific American Library, 1991), 24.
• Page 200, “We Spaniards know a sickness”: quoted by Cortés's secretary Francisco López de Gómara in General History of the Indies (Zaragoza, 1552).
• Page 303, “grow like a tree with a body”: Johann Rudolf Glauber, Furni novi philosophici (1646), quoted in Laura M. Barge et al., “From Chemical Gardens to Chemobrionics,” Chemical Reviews 115 (2015): 8654.
• Page 304, “very pleasant to behold”: ibid.
• Page 311, “I shall never forget the sight”: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 24.
• Page 329, “If the Jewish wolf Pflaumbaum”: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Penguin, 1995), 159–160.
• Page 349, “Here was shown at once a new world”: Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, introduction to Zur Farben-Chemie (Berlin, 1850), quoted in Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 57.
• Page 351, “inhabits the elements”: Runge, quoted in ibid., 67.
• Page 355, “I loved the yellowness, the heaviness, of gold”: Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (London: Picador, 2002), 3–4.
• Page 355, “It is the sensuous elements”: Robert Woodward, quoted by his daughter Crystal E. Woodward in “Art and Elegance in the Synthesis of Organic Compounds: Robert Burns Woodward,” in Doris B. Wallace and Howard E. Gruber, eds., Creative People at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 137.
• Page 355, “it looked like an old-fashioned chemist's shop”: Oliver Sacks, “Brilliant Light: A Chemical Boyhood,” New Yorker, 20 December 1999.
• Page 356, “I have often suspected”: Primo Levi, quoted in Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 76.
• Page 358, “To the natural philosopher”: John Frederick William Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longman, 1851), 10, 11.
• Page 362, “My profession”: Primo Levi, The Monkey's Wrench, trans. William Weaver (London: Penguin, 1987), 142–144.