19/09/2026
https://amazon.fr/dp/B0HK4ZSY3Q
https://amazon.com.au/dp/BB0HK4ZSY3Q
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/dp/B0HK4ZSY3Q
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/BB0HK4ZSY3Q
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HK4ZSY3Q
Johann Jakob de Maldiny’s The Wonders of the World is an eighteenth-century treatise presenting the origins, progress, and practical value of the sciences and arts, especially chemistry and alchemy. Dedicated to King George I of Great Britain, the work claims to reveal useful and carefully tested secrets in mathematics, mechanics, physics, medicine, and chemistry, while also incorporating experiments attributed to Arnold of Villanova. Maldiny frames the book as a rare and guarded collection of knowledge, intended for serious readers who will apply it through practice rather than mere speculation.
The treatise begins with theology, placing God as the first cause of all wonders and the source of both natural and revealed knowledge. Christian theology is treated as the highest wisdom, though Maldiny quickly turns from doctrine to the natural world, stating that his concern is not superstition or magic but the hidden yet lawful operations of nature granted by God to humanity.
In the chapters on mathematics, Maldiny describes quantity, space, time, number, shape, proportion, and motion as foundations of created reality. Arithmetic is called the “queen” and key of the arts, while geometry gives rise to mechanics, architecture, astronomy, navigation, and engineering. Human art is praised for its ability to extend nature through machines, buildings, ships, and instruments.
The astronomical sections explain the heavens through luminaries, vortices, subtle matter, and the influence of sun, moon, stars, and planets on earthly things. The sun is presented as a cause of day, season, heat, and growth; the moon is associated with moisture, tides, swelling, decay, and preservation. Later chapters examine fire, light, air, colours, water, fluids, oils, earth, salts, sulphur, plants, animals, and the human body, often linking natural properties with practical uses.
Medicine is described as ancient and increasingly perfected through chemistry, which supplies distilled waters, powders, salts, spirits, essences, and elixirs from minerals, plants, animals, and metals. The final emphasis falls on alchemy, defined as the art of transforming natural bodies into artificial ones by separating, dissolving, rearranging, and recombining their internal parts. For Maldiny, chemistry is not vain speculation but the “mother of the arts,” valuable because it reveals nature’s hidden processes and produces practical remedies and transformations.
The Wonders of the World