1895.] on the Barer Metals and their Alloys. 499 



real to me, and I want them to be so to you ; listen to me, then, as 

 speaking for my silent metallic friends, while I try to secure for them 

 your sympathy, esteem and intuitive perception of their beauty. 



First, as regards their origin and early history. I fully share 

 Mr. Lockyer's belief as to their origin, and think that a future 

 generation will speak of the evolution of metals as we now do of that 

 of animals, and that observers will naturally turn to the sun as the 

 field in which this evolution can best be studied. 



To the alchemists metals were almost sentient ; they treated them 

 as if they were living beings, and had an elaborate pharmacopoeia of 

 " medicines " which they freely administered to metals in the hope of 

 perfecting their constitution. If the alchemists constantly drew 

 parallels between living things and metals, it is not because they were 

 ignorant, but because they recognised in metals the possession of 

 attributes which closely resemble those of organisms. " The first al- 

 chemists were gnostics, and the old beliefs of Egypt blended with 

 those of Chaldea in the second and third centuries. The old metals 

 of the Egyptians represented men, and this is probably the origin of 

 the homunculus of the middle ages, the notion of the creative power of 

 metals and that of life being confounded in the same symbol." * 



Thus Albertus Magnus traces the influence of congenital defects 

 in the generation of metals and of animals, and Basil Valentine 

 symbolises the loss of metalline character, which we now know is due 

 to oxidation, to the escape from the metal of an indestructible spirit 

 which flies away and becomes a soul. On the other hand, the 

 " reduction " of metals from their oxides was supposed to give the 

 metals a new existence | A poem of the thirteenth century well 

 embodies this belief in the analogies between men and metals, in the 

 quaint lines : — 



" Horns ont 1'estre comme metaulx, 

 Vie et augment des vegetaulx, 

 Instinct et sens comme les bruts, 

 Esprit comme ange en attributs." 



" Men have being " — constitution — like metals ; you see how closely 

 metals and life were connected in the minds of the alchemists, and we 

 inherit their traditions. 



" Who said these old renowns, dead long ago, could make me 

 forget the living world ? " are words which Browning places in the 

 lips of Paracelsus, and we metallurgists are not likely to forget 

 the living world ; we borrow its definitions, and apply them to our 

 metals. Thus nobility in metals as in men, means freedom from 



* Berthelot, ' Les origines de l'alchimie,' 1885, p. 60. 



t ' Les Kemonstrances ou la complainte de nature a 1'alchymiste errant.' 

 Attributed to Jeban de Meung, who with Guillaume de Lorris wrote tbe 

 * Roman de la Rose.' M. Meon, the editor of the edition of 1814 of this 

 celebrated work, doubts, however, whether the attribution of the complainte de 

 nature, to Meung is correct. 



