The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, or "The Hunting of the Greene Lyon"

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs's The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, or The Hunting of the Greene Lyon, published by Cambridge University Press in 1975, is a scholarly study of Isaac Newton's extensive alchemical research, a body of work long marginalized in Newton scholarship before Dobbs's own detailed archival study of his alchemical manuscripts. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Dobbs's own direct archival work with Newton's actual alchemical papers. Its strength is treating that material as a serious subject of intellectual history rather than dismissing it as an embarrassing footnote to Newton's physics, a stance later Newton scholarship has largely followed. Its limit is age relative to the considerable further Newton alchemy scholarship the following decades produced, so a very specific claim benefits from checking against that later literature as well.