250 CHEMISTRY. 



The splendid progress of Chemistry is well depicted in a quaint^ 

 but beautiful, description of a sunrise, by Bishop Taylor. The sci- 

 ence had long been hidden during the dim star-light of a dreary 

 night, occasionally lighted up, perchance, for a moment, by the 

 quick passage of a fiery meteor, and relapsing again into a deeper 

 darkness. " But when the sun approaches towards the gates of the 

 morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the 

 spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark 

 to matins, and, by and bye, gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps 

 over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those 

 which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a 

 veil because himself had seen the face of God ; and still while a 

 man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shews a fair face 

 and a full light." Such was the state of Chemistry during the long 

 night of alchemy — such its sudden rise and development ; and 

 it still may be considered but as in the early dawn of a glorious 

 day. 



It may not, perhaps, be uninteresting to take a rapid survey of 

 the progress of Chemistry. The ancients practised many of the 

 arts dependant upon Chemistry — as those of dyeing and smelting— 

 but in profound ignorance of the principles upon which they de- 

 pended. Then arose Geber, the Arabian, the father of the most 

 indefatigable race of men which the world ever produced.* Their 

 researches were, however, principally confined to the visionary pur- 

 suit of the philosopher's stone, and that of the elixir of life, which 

 were to confer upon the possessor unbounded wealth, and an immor- 

 tality of blooming youth. Upon this subject, five thousand volumes 



• The style in which the earliest of the chemists wrote, was not particu- 

 larly lucid and simple. The names of two of these writers, that of Geber, 

 and that of PhiUippus Aureolas Theophrastus Parocelsus Bombast ab 

 Hohenheim, are immortalized in our English words gibberish, correctly ge- 

 berish, and bombast. The following is Geber's account of that grand deside- 

 ratum, the philosopher's stone. " We endeavour to make one substance, 

 yet compounded and composed of many ; so permanently fixed, that being 

 put upon the fire, the fire cannot injure ; and that it may be mixed with 

 metals in flux and flow with them, and enter into that which in them is of 

 an ingressible substance, and be fermented with that which in them is of a 

 permeable substance, and be consolidated with that which in them is of con- 

 solidable substance, and be fixed with that which in them is of a fixable sub- 

 stance, and not be burnt by those things which bum not gold and silver, and 

 take away consolidation, and weights with due ignition."— jEf/^/ory of ChemiS' 

 try, L, 132. 



