MEMOm OF LOUIS JACQUES THEMRD. 



ByM.FLOURENS, 

 perpetual secretary of the french academy of sciences. 



TRANSLATKD FOR THE SMITHSOxVIAN INSTITUTION BY C. A. ALEXANDER. 



Alcliemy, the offspring of man's love for the marvellous and proncness to 

 credulity, and therefore almost as old as the world itself, was introduced into 

 Europe by the Arabs. It promised riches and health : no Avouder it was re- 

 ceived with general homage. Its immediate object was that mysterious sub- 

 stance the j)hUosophcr'' s stone, by means of which it proposed to effect the 

 transmutation of all metals into gold, to cure all diseases, secure an indefinite 

 term of life, and open for men an intercourse with spiritual beings. Thousands 

 of ardent adepts dedicated their lives to this chimera, one of whom has thus 

 described his fellows: "An eccentric, hcteroclite, heterogeneous, anomalous sort 

 of men, possessed of a strange and peculiar taste by which they ingeniously 

 contrive to lose their health, their money, their time, and their life." From the 

 midst of the darkness, however, leaped some vivifying sparks ; these indefati- 

 gable seekers bcc[ueathed us several enduring acquisitions ; it is to them we 

 are indebted for gunpowder, alcohol, the mineral acids and antimony, lloger 

 Bacon, Arnaud de Villeneuve, Raimond Lully, Valentine, Paracelsus, Van Hel- 

 mont, Becher, are the representatives of this heroic age of chemistry, which 

 recognizes them as its authors. 



Absurdity long shackled the progress of the new science. Saint Simou 

 gravely tells us that the Duke of Orleans, "who diligently cultivated chem- 

 istry, had used all its resources to get a sight of the devil, but without success." 

 That elder age of the alchemists, which had failed in supplying the means for 

 getting sight of the devil, had been followed by one which did succeed in 

 getting sight of the Arabian remedies, an achievement, according to Giii Patin, 

 of just as little value. " I have made enemies, he complains, of all the Ara- 

 bian cooks who, with antimony alone, slay more persons than the King of 

 Sweden has done in Germany." He describes the physician of Cardinal 

 Mazarin as one who "piques himself on three things which no wise man ever 

 did — a knowledge of chemistry, astrology, and the philosopher's stone; it is not 

 with such fine secrets as these that maladies are to be cured." One of these 

 fine secrets, however, was destined to make its way in the world. Lemery, 

 arriving at Paris in 1G66, attached himself to Glazer, then demonstrator at the 

 Jardin du Eoi, as the best source of experiments and analyses. "Unluckily," 

 says Fouteuelle, "he found that M. Glazer was a true chemist, full of absurd 

 ideas, and jealous even of these." Quitting him, therefore, Lemery entered 

 himself as master apothecary, inseparable then from the character of chemist, 

 and opened a course of public lectures. "His laboratory," Fontenelle tells us, 

 "was less an apartment than a cavern, which might have been taken for a magi- 

 cian's, lighted as it was only by the glare of furnaces. Yet the resort to it was so 

 great that the operator could scarcely find room for his exhibitions." This 

 course was printed, and as it professed to divulge what Avas then called the 



