Definition of "laboratory"

Again she read the passage that had riveted her attention; and, rising from her seat, carried the still open volume, and laid it on a slab by the furnace in the laboratory: it was a celebrated treatise on poisons, written in the fifteenth century.

1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Laboratory”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], page 325

[Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes.

2014 June 21, “Magician’s brain”, in The Economist, volume 411, number 8892