634 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



were also created as well as vegetable substances, and have been 

 in travail to produce seeds from wbich others could be engen- 

 dered. Crystal is not so dead but that it is given to it to know 

 how to separate itself from other waters, and from itself, with its 

 angles and diamond-points, in the midst of them. Thus, mineral 

 matters are not so inert but they bring forth and gradually pro- 

 duce most excellent things. These mineral matters are intermin- 

 gled and unrecognized among the waters, in the matrix of the 

 earth, so that every human and brute creature is engendered un- 

 der a kind of water. The matters of metals are concealed in such 

 a way that it is impossible for man to distinguish them before 

 they are congealed, just as no one can tell that water in which 

 salt is dissolved is saline without tasting it with his tongue." 

 Then, replying to the alchemists who had recourse in their ex- 

 periments to the highest furnace-temperatures then known, Pa- 

 lissy added, " When you have tried everything by fire, you will 

 find that my saying is true, that water is the beginning and origin 

 of all natural things." One could not reason more ingeniously 

 respecting an idea wholly of the imagination, but which could 

 hardly have been sounder, at a time when, chemistry not having 

 yet put on a scientific character, the nature of the substances 

 whose origin it was sought to ascertain was still almost unknown. 

 Struck by the admirable regularity of the motions of the stars, 

 a number of minds were led, by a mystical generalization, to draw 

 from them consequences applicable to the phenomena of our 

 planet. According to a doctrine that goes back to the Chaldeans, 

 and is also found among the Egyptians, sidereal influences con- 

 tribute to the maturing (that is, to the subterranean transforma- 

 tion) of mineral substances. Mysterious relations were supposed 

 between the celestial bodies of our solar system and metals, the 

 luster of which has some resemblance to the color of the stars. 

 Conformably to the principle of likes, gold corresponded with the 

 sun, silver with the moon, iron with Mars, copper with Venus, lead 

 with Saturn, and tin with Jupiter. Strange as it may seem, this 

 fancy had not been abandoned two centuries ago. An old German 

 practical miner's manual, the " Bergbiichlein," the earliest known 

 edition of which is dated in 1505, contains figures in which metal- 

 liferous veins may be seen running into the interior of the earth, 

 and in the sky the planets which correspond respectively with the 

 various metals, and from which the generative effluviee are flow- 

 ing. " With the birth and growth of a metallic mineral," it is 

 said in the book, " are involved, on the one side an agent, and on 

 the other a subordinate substance or matter, which is capable of 

 being set into activity, like something in fermentation. The gen- 

 eral agent is the sky, with its movements, the revolution of its 

 planets, and its luminous radiation. This is why each metallic 



