The speech of alchemy

To learn the speech of alchemy, an early form of chemistry in which people attempted to turn metals into gold, it helps to think back to a time when there was no science: no atomic number or weight, no periodic chart no list of elements. To the alchemists the 1 was not made of leptons, bosons, gluons, and quarks. Instead it was made of substances, and one substance-say, walnut oil-could be just as 2 as another-say, silver-even though modern 3 would say one is heterogeneous and the other homogeneous. Without knowledge of atomic structure show would it be 4 to tell elements from compounds?