Using as their guides the laboratory notebooks of George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin, and Starkey's previously misunderstood interactions with Robert Boyle, widely known as "the father of chemistry," William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe reveal the hitherto hidden operations of Starkey's laboratory and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry were already present in alchemy. The authors also show how this American "chymist" translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice - and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the authors argue, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution.