A gleaming addition to the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fireplace alternate history series created by Eric Flint. An alchemist of the 17th hundred years confronts modern research with frequently amusing outcomes. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the world’s most significant alchemist and a great-grandson of Paracelsus-and a Bombast on his mother’s side-was a guy history had forgotten. But when the town of Grantville was transferred by a cosmic incident from modern Western Virginia to central Germany in about 1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz the first seventeenth century, he got a second chance at popularity and fortune. The world’s best alchemist does not make household products. But with ideal enticements Gribbleflotz is persuaded to make baking soda and then baking powder so the time-displaced People in america can continue steadily to enjoy such culinary classics as biscuits and gravy. Applying his superb grasp from the concepts of alchemy towards the muddled and confused notions the People in america have regarding what they call ‘chemistry,’ Gribbleflotz leaves obscurity behind. In his relentless search for a method to invigorate the quinta essential of the human being humors, Gribbleflotz takes on a central part in jump-starting the seventeenth century’s new chemical and marital aids industries-and pioneering such essential fields of human being understanding as pyramidology and aura imaging. These are his chronicles.