SECT. 2] TO THE RENAISSANCE 95 



out of them. One example taken from Berthelot's collection will 

 suffice; it comes from the "6th book of the Philosopher" (Syriac). 



To make water of eggs 



Take as many eggs as you wish, break them and put the whites in a 

 glass flask, place this in another vessel and surround it with fresh horse- 

 dung up to the neck of the vessel. Leave it so for 15 days changing the 

 dung every 5 days. Then distil the liquid in an alembic and taking a 

 pound of the distillate add lime of eggs 2 ozs. Shake well and distil again. 

 Do this 4 times. Take then of elixir of arsenic, 2 parts, of sulphur i part, 

 of pyrites and magnesia, each i part. Pound in a mortar and add to the 

 final distillate from the eggs. Do this for 7 days always working in the 

 sunlight, once at sunrise, once in the middle of the day, and once at 

 sunset. When this has been done, dry the mixture, pound it, and set it 

 aside. 



I could only find one reference to the embryo in a hen's egg among 

 the vast number of alchemical directions of this time, and then only 

 as a constituent of the egg which must be discarded. As we shall see, 

 it is not until after the time of Paracelsus that the notion of applying 

 chemical methods to eggs or embryos arises at all. 



2-2. St Hildegard: the Lowest Depth 



Not long after the death of Avicenna, St Hildegard was born. 

 She lived from 1098 to 1180, and was Abbess successively of Disi- 

 bodenberg and Bingen in the Rhineland. Her treatises on the world, 

 which are an extraordinary medley of theological, mystical, scientific 

 and philosophical speculation, have been described in detail by 

 Singer, and, though in the books. Liber Scivias and Liber Divinorum 

 Operum simplicis hominis, there is little of embryological interest, yet 

 she does give an account of development and especially of the entry 

 of the soul into the foetus. 



This is illustrated in Plate HI taken from the Wiesbaden Codex B 

 of the Liber Scivias. The soul is here shown passing down from heaven 

 into the body of the pregnant woman and so to the embryo within 

 her. The divine wisdom is represented by a square object with its 

 angles pointing to the four corners of the earth in symbol of stabihty. 

 From it a long tube-Hke process descends into the mother's womb 

 and down it the soul passes as a bright object, "spherical" or "shape- 

 less", illuminating the whole body. The scene shows the mother in 

 the foreground lying down ; inside her there are traces of the foetal 

 membranes; behind this ten persons are grouped, each carrying a 



