Experiment, William Herschel wrote, is a matter of "putting in action causes and agents over which we have control, and purposely varying their combinations, and noticing what effects take place" (Herschel 1966, p. 76). In this sense, the earliest recorded scientific experiments appeared in biological and medical contexts. In the second century CE, the physician Galen performed detailed animal experiments to find out about the functions of various organs. In the sixteenth century, Andreas Vesalius, pioneer in dissection, carried out elaborate experiments; and William Harvey, notwithstanding his Aristotelian orientation, supported his discovery of the circulation of the blood with painstaking experimental arguments. It is highly plausible that the practice of alchemy also served as an early source of experimentation. From the thirteenth century on, alchemists used laboratory equipment in order to create new agents and were arguing against the overly narrow interpretation of the art-nature divide...