The underlined word "hampered" in Line 1 Para 2 is closest in meaning to _______.

A．The scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.
B．Reasons that chemistry developed slowly as a science.
C．The practical aspects of chemistry.
D．Difficulties of organizing knowledge systematically.

A．Chemical knowledge was limited to a small number of people.
B．The symbolic language used was very imprecise.
C．Very few new discoveries were made by alchemists.
D．The records of the chemical processes were not based on experiments.