On the whole, Newton preferred not to publicize his involvement in alchemy. Unlike his other major pursuits, nothing of his alchemy, or at least nothing explicitly labeled as alchemy, appeared in print during his lifetime or in the years immediately following his death. A few people did know about it. A fascinating correspondence between Newton and John Locke following the death of Robert Boyle reveals that the three men, possibly the last three men from Restoration England whom one would have expected, only a generation ago, to find so engaged, exchanged alchemical secrets and pledged each other to silence. John Conduitt, the husband of Newton's niece, who gathered material about his life, knew of his experiments in Cambridge and reported that his furnace there remained an item of curiosity shown to visitors. Nevertheless, the adjective Conduitt used was “chymical,” not “alchymical,” and in a similar manner knowledge of Newton's interest in the art quickly sank from view. When David Brewster found alchemical manuscripts in Newton's own hand among his papers, he was appalled and quickly dismissed them as a curious relic of an earlier age. It waited until the twentieth century for the record to become public, with the auction of the papers still in the hands of the Portsmouth family, and for scholars to come to grips with it. Lord Keynes purchased some of the alchemical papers at the auction and insisted forcefully on their importance, but only in our own generation have scholars ready to take the papers seriously systematically studied the entire corpus, or rather that part – well over 90 percent – of the corpus known to exist that is available to the public.