88 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL 



their methods, and the significance of their results— mistaken to them- ' 

 selves, I fancy, often as much as to the people who believed in them — • 

 were groping after truth. If they were mistakenly engaged in the 

 search for the philosopher's stone, that should transmute all metals, 

 and an elixir of life, that should cure all ills and make man immune 

 and immortal, they were nevertheless searching for new properties 

 of matter that were surmised, but could not be grasped and always lay 

 a little bit beyond them. Their search for truth did not lead them 

 precisely to the goal that they had in mind, but it did lead them for- 

 ward from one discovered truth, or even half-truth, to another, and 

 by countless analysis and synthesis, by breaking down and building 

 up, by disproving and by proving, by combining and dis-combining, 

 truth has been added to truth, and out of the hodge-podge and magic 

 mystery with which the processes of the Alchemists were clothed, and 

 with which they themselves apparently were wont to clothe them, 

 there has gradually emerged the great and incalculably important 

 science of chemistry, with its sure foundation of discovered laws, of 

 exact processes and of sure results, and your own vastly important 

 sciences of Pharmacy, with a true Materia Medica and a clearly appre- 

 hended Pharmacognosy, that is as far from the knowledge of the 

 Alchemists as modern Astronomy, with its exact mathematics and its 

 understanding and use of physical laws, is distant from the Astrology 

 that preceded it. In looking backward to these beginnings, in what- 

 ever science they may be found, the real and vital significance of this 

 search for truth in the progress of mankind is brought home as it 

 scarcely can be in any other way. The early gropings after the 

 inherent truth leads on from one uncovered verity to another, until 

 by the accretion of increment to increment there arises a great and 

 powerful whole that in its way may even act as a lever to move the 

 world of men. Your progenitors, the old Alchemists, searchers after 

 truth that for them was hidden, as truth has been said to be often 

 hidden, even at the bottom of a well, started out, you will remember, 

 with the extraordinary belief that there were but three fundamental 

 substances : sulphur, mercury and salt ! Their pharmacopoeia, for 

 they were both chemists and pharmacists, was as crude and mistaken 

 and if possible even more so, and they had scarcely a gleam of the 

 true knowledge of a science of pharmacology at all. The search for 

 truth has led their successors in Chemistry and Pharmacy far afield 

 from these early imaginings and the haphazard results that were sure 



