The Alchymist and The Silurist is a historical novel based on the sometimes tortured life of Thomas Vaughan, the 17th-century Welsh Anglican pastor, who became obsessed with alchemy, and his twin brother Henry, the mystical poet known as the Silurist, distant kinsmen of 83 year-old author James E. Vaughan. When Thomas Vaughan's church was taken down by Puritan rebels, he sailed to America to meet a Harvard scientist named George Starkey, nee George Stirke, who was said to be pursuing the same goal as Thomas. Upon landing at a port on the River of De La Warr, he was met by Andrew Boynton, a tall red-headed stranger who introduced him to a tribe of Lenni-Lenape Native Americans. He spent a year amongst the Lenni- Lenape, met and mated with a lovely Lenape maiden, and returned to England where he resumed his scientific experiments in the King's laboratory at Whitehall. Oxford University, the English Civil War and the Plague all play key roles in the telling of this story. The different character traits of the twin brothers were not always discernable even to close friends, who often mistakenly regarded them as identical in personality as well as in appearance, witness the comments of their friend Thomas Powell of Cantref, who once remarked, "What Planet rul'd your birth? What wittie star? That you so like in Souls as Bodies are Not only your faces, but your wits are twins." Stories of the controversial alchymist Thomas Vaughan were revived some two hundred years after his death by a roguish French writer named Gabrielle Jogand-Pages who, under the pen name Leo Taxil, created elaborate hoaxes, pitting Freemasons against Catholics. Taxil published a series of salacious accounts of theactivities of a young American girl named Diana Vaughan, who had journeyed to Paris hoping to prove her kinship to the 17th-century Welsh scientist. The Alchymist and The Sillurist will be followed by its sequel Diana and Leo.