"I don't think old school alchemy is undignified. People did a lot of clever stuff! It took a long time before enough raw data was in enough public corpora at once for someone to notice the periodic table. Part of why it took so long is that most of alchemy was either a trade secret or part of some scam/fraud and therefore also a trade secret. Like, part of why they all wrote under pseudonyms is they were generally betraying someone by publishing these things. A lot of what made the Enlightenment a big deal is that people just kind of decided to defy the norm that these things be trade secrets. It was basically the free software/open source movement of its day. Which, a lot of the central organizing myth for why alchemy is trade secrets is the philosophers stone. The stone is a secret, betraying the secret would take wisdom out of the world by removing the subsidy for philosophical masters. Once belief in the stone itself subsided, which occurred well before the periodic table. It became socially possible for people to study chemistry openly. People usually think we discovered gold is an element and therefore concluded the stone is impossible. But it was actually just raw pattern matching in the midst of a general epistemic crisis. People threw out anything that had the shape of being well attested by esteemed sources yet empirically seen nowhere. Jesus of Nazareth, vampires, oh right the philosophers stone."