HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE GOLD-CURE. 47 i 



whom so many wonderful discoveries and inventions have been 

 ascribed, had deep faith in the virtues of potable gold. Bacon, in 

 a communication to Pope Nicolas IV, informs his Holiness of an 

 old man who found some yellow liquor in a golden flask, when 

 plowing one day in Sicily. Supposing it to be dew, he drank it 

 off, and was immediately transformed into a hale, robust, and 

 highly accomplished youth. Having abandoned his day-laboring 

 he was admitted to the service of the King of Sicily, and served 

 the court eighty years. 



The belief in a life-prolonging elixir, sometimes claimed of the 

 tincture of gold and sometimes of secret preparations, prevailed 

 for centuries. Even so great a philosopher as Descartes believed 

 he had attained the art of living a few hundred years ; this belief 

 was shared by some of his friends, and when he died before reach- 

 ing sixty years they were convinced that he had been poisoned. 



The alchemist Raymond Lully a contemporary of Friar 

 Bacon, also experienced the restorative effect of this fountain of 

 youth, if we can credit the statement in the curious verses of Sir 

 George Ripley, composed in 1471 : 



"An Oyle is drawne owte in colour of Gold, 

 Or lyke thereto oat of our fire Red Lead, 

 "Whych Raymond sayd when he was old, 



Much more than Gold wold stand hym in stede. 

 For when he was for age nygh dede, 

 He made thereof Aurum Potabile 

 Whych hym revyvyd as men myght see." 



(Compound of Alchymie.) 



Oswald Croll, a German physician of the sixteenth century, 

 wrote in 1609 in praise of gold as a medicine. I quote the Eng- 

 lish translation of his Basilica chymica, published at London in 

 1670: 



" It is the principle part of a Physician that would Cure the 

 Sick, first to comfort the Heart, and afterwards assault the Disease. 

 Those to whom the harmonious Analogy of Superiours and Inf eri- 

 ours hath been known, and who from Suffrages of Astrologers have 

 learned that to the two greatest Lights of Heaven, the two prin- 

 ciple parts of Man, viz : the Heart and Brain, in things of Nature 

 latently rests in Gold. . . . For Nature hath endowed Gold with 

 no contemptible virtues, which who so knows how to draw out, 

 and by ingenious Artifice is able rightly to use, he will find Gold, 

 which seemed dead and barren, so lively and pregnant that it 

 germinates and of itself progenerates new Gold. . . . Whence the 

 true Philosophers have exquisitely prepared a wonderful and 

 greatly to be desired Medicine with which the impurities of 

 imperfect metals are removed and all vices of affects in uncurable 

 Diseases of Humane Bodies perfectly exterminated." 



