Holiness issued a decree prohibiting Christians from purchasing from the infidels under pain of excommunication. Later, when, in Charles I's reign, Sir Thomas Challoner discovered an aluminous deposit near his home at Guisborough in Yorkshire, and persuaded some of the Pope's workmen to come there to work the schist, he and those whom he had tempted away were solemnly and most vigorously "cursed."
Meanwhile the nature of the earth with which the sulphuric acid was combined remained unknown to chemists. Stahl worked at the problem and came to the conclusion that it was lime. The younger Geoffroy, a famous pharmacist of Paris, ascertained (1728) that the earth of alum was identical with that of argillaceous earth and Alumina was for some time called Argile. Marggraf observed that he could not get alum crystals from a combination of argile and sulphuric acid, but noting that in the old factories it had been the custom to add putrid urine to the solution, for which carbonate of potash was subsequently substituted, went so far as to make the salt, but did not appreciate that it was actually a double salt. The name alumina which the earth now bears was given to it by Morveau. It was Vauquelin (another pharmacist) who clearly proved the composition of alum, and Lavoisier first suggested that alumina was the oxide of a metal. Sir Humphry Davy agreed with this view but failed to isolate the metal. Oersted was the first to actually extract aluminium from the oxide, but his process was an impracticable one, but in 1828 Woehler, and in 1858 Deville, found means of producing the metal in sufficient abundance to make it a valuable article of industry.
