THE GENEALOGY OF CHEMISTRY. 541 



came under notice — mercury, or liquid silver — which corr^ponded 

 still more nearly with the idea of the primary metallic matter, '^o 

 author has informed us concerning the origin of the discovery of 

 this singular metal. We only know that the Carthaginians were at 

 that time working the mines of Betica, and that the minerals of 

 mercury, situated in the same region, were well known and operated 

 in the time of the Koman Empire. At any rate, the appearance 

 and properties of this liquid and vaporizable silver, which was almost 

 as refractory to chemical reagents as its ancient solid homonym, 

 struck the imagination forcibly. It only seemed necessary to fix 

 it — that is, to take away its liquidity and volatility — to obtain the 

 other metals, particularly real silver. Mercury thus became the 

 primary metal of the alchemists. A letter is extant from Synesius, 

 a writer of the end of the fourth century, to Dioscorus, embodying 

 a kind of catechism concerning the qualities and relations of this 

 substance, from which we gather that, being the primary matter of 

 metals, the first essential proceeding was to fix it or make it solid 

 and stable as to fire, like other metals; then to color it, by the 

 aid of some white or yellow tinctorial substance, such as sulphur or 

 the sulphurets of arsenic, by which it would finally be changed into 

 gold or silver. The name mercury had a variety of significations. 

 It represented native mercury, extracted directly from the mines; 

 artificial quicksilver, prepared from cinnabar, which was called cop- 

 per mercury, lead mercury, or tin mercury, according as it was pre- 

 pared in the cold by crushing cinnabar in a mortar with copper, lead, 

 tin, etc., when the mercury produced appeared to participate in the 

 qualities of the metal which had been used in its preparation. To 

 us it is always the same mercury, rendered impure, indeed, by some 

 trace of the precipitating metal; but in the eyes of the alchemists 

 there were different metals. Furthermore, the term mercury was 

 applied to two substances which we know were radically different: 

 modern mercury, or mercury extracted from cinnabar, and metallic 

 arsenic, which they called mercury extracted from orpiment. Both 

 are, in fact, volatile and susceptible of sublimation, and both form 

 red sublimates; both turn copper white, and both form red sul- 

 phurets. From these particulars we can see how broad was the mean- 

 ing of the common word mercury, and how the mercury of the 

 philosophers represented a kind of quintessence, common to these 

 various kinds of mercury, or the primary matter of the metals, sus- 

 ceptible of being changed by coloring into gold or silver. The 

 work to be done, then, was to extract this mercury from ordinary 

 metals, and then color it to gold or silver; or to operate on its sub- 

 stance as it was contained in the copper, lead, tin, and iron, so as to 

 eliminate the contrary qualities and perfect the conformable quali- 



