A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HOAX 599 



absence of any support but tradition for the reality of a fifteenth-century 

 writer under the name or pseudonym of Basil Valentine, that we are 

 not only justified, but in justice obliged to conclude that the works in 

 question were written at or about the period of their production; that 

 in all probability Joh. Tholde was the author of the more important and 

 earlier ones; that Paracelsus was not guilty of stealing his chemical 

 knowledge from a unique copy of some unknown original, and that not 

 Basil Valentine nor Tholde, but Paracelsus, was the first recorder, if 

 not the first discoverer, of a considerable series of chemical facts, and 

 the originator of some influential theories and applications, which 

 appeared for the first time in his publications. 



But the established channels of three centuries of chemical tradition 

 are hard to divert. Despite the verdict of modern scholarship, recent 

 text-books and manuals of the history of chemical science are slow to 

 accept and assimilate the changes involved. 



Thus, in the "History of Chemistry," by P. P. Armitage (1906), 

 it is still assumed that Basil Valentine or some one writing under that 

 name lived at the end of the fifteenth century, and consequently such 

 statements occur as the following: 



With Valentine's successor, Paracelsus, there begins a new school of 

 chemistry. 



Accepting Valentine's philosophy of the three elements, mercury, sulphur 

 and salt and like him reading this into all matter indiscriminately, Paracelsus 

 was able to give a theoretic basis to his sense of pathologic phenomena. 



So also Hugo Bauer (translation of P. V. Stanford, "History of 

 Chemistry," 1907), while stating that "new life was brought into this 

 ruinous state of affairs in the second half of the seventeenth century 14 

 by Basil Valentine," yet says: 



The most decisive influence upon chemical thought in this period proceeded 

 from the physician Paracelsus, and his successors Van Helmont and de Boe 

 Sylvius. Basil Valentine had already put forth the view that all substances 

 consisted of the three elements sulphur, mercury and salt. 



Bauer also gives much space to the chemical work of Basil Valentine 

 and overlooks the similar work of Paracelsus. 



Sir Edward Thorpe 15 refrains from assigning any definite period 

 to Basil Valentine, saying : 



He was supposed to be a Benedictine monk who lived in Saxony during the 

 latter half of the fifteenth century: but there are grounds for the belief that 

 the numerous writings ascribed to him are in reality the work of various hands. 

 The attempt made by Maxmilian I. to discover the identity of the author was 

 unavailing, nor have subsequent inquiries had any better result. 



Thorpe, however, gives a summary of the more important chemical 



"This may be a misprint for the fifteenth. The subsequent method and 

 order of treatment would bear out such a supposition. 

 ""History of Chemistry," 1909. 



