50 Kansas Academy of Science. 



Paracelsus taught that "the object of chemistry is not to make gold, 

 but to prepare medicines." He considered that the operations which 

 occur in the human body are chemical ones and that the state of health 

 is dependent upon the composition of the organs and the juices they 

 secrete. Medicine, he asserted, rests upon four pillars, chemistry, philos- 

 ophy, astronomy, and virtue. Organic (?) bodies were composed of 

 mercury, sulphur and salt, which corresponded to the physical "phenomena 

 of volatilization, combustibility and solidification," but which were re- 

 lated in a higher sense to spirit, soul and body; and the increase and 

 decrease of these principles from their normal amount caused illnesses. 



One of the disciples of Paracelsus, Johann Baptist von Helmont, was 

 apparently modest. He says: "I thought it more profitable, seriously 

 and conscientiously, to examine myself; and then I perceived that in 

 reality I knew nothing, or, at least, nothing that was worth knowing. 

 Finding that nothing was sound, nothing true, and unwilling to be de- 

 clared master of the seven arts, my conscience told me I knew not one. 

 The Jesuits, who then taught philosophy at Louvain, expounded to me 

 the disquisitions and secrets of magic, but these were empty and un- 

 profitable conceits; and instead of grain, I reaped stubble. In moral 

 philosophy, when I expected to grasp the quintessence of truth, the 

 empty and swollen bubble snapped in my hands. I then turned my 

 thoughts to medicine, and having seriously read Galen and Hippocrates, 

 noted all that seemed certain and incontrovertible; but was dismayed 

 upon revising my notes, when I found that the pains I had bestowed, 

 and the years I had spent, were altogether fruitless; but I learned at 

 least the emptiness of books and formal discourses and promises of the 

 schools. I went abroad and there I found the same sluggishness in 

 study, the same blind obedience to the doctrines of their forefathers, 

 the same deep-rooted ignorance." He therefore concluded that medical 

 knowledge was not to be obtained from the writings of men or from 

 human industry. 



One of his discoveries was that dirty linen packed in a vessel with 

 flour would in time produce mice, and that a toad's bones applied to an 

 offending part was a certain anodyne. He boasted that he possessed a 

 fluid, the "alcahest," which was capable of penetrating into bodies, pro- 

 ducing an entire separation and transmutation of their component parts. 

 No one, not even his son, saw this wonderful fluid, and its possession was 

 a secret von Helmont cautiously guarded. 



Von Helmont looked upon water as the chief constituent of all matter, 

 and brought forward many arguments in support of his theory from the 

 animal and vegetable world. That water was present in organic bodies 

 he concluded from the fact of invariably procuring it as a product of 

 their combustion. He believed that he contributed a strong proof of this 

 by the following experiment: He took an earthen vessel of large dimen- 

 sions, and filled it with two hundred pounds of dry earth, in which he 

 planted a willow weighing five pounds. This was then duly watered with 

 rain and distilled water for five years, at the end of which time he pulled 

 up the willow and found that it weighed one hundred and sixty-nine 

 pounds and three ounces. Moreover, the earth had decreased two ounces 



