Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 63 



They also fish by means of cucurios, this being a sport of which they are 

 passionately fond and which they follow from their cradles. 



Martyr's account is far more detailed and fanciful, but actually 

 incorrect. There is no evidence that the cucuyo catches gnats, in 

 fact it lives on the juice of sugar cane. Nevertheless, the idea that 

 the cucuyo kills mosquitoes has been copied by many subsequent 

 writers. It occurs in the account of Francisco Lopez de Gomara 

 {ca. 1510-ca. 1560) , the priest and popular Spanish historian, whose 

 Historia General de las Indias y Conquista de Mejico was published 

 at Zaragoza in 1552. His account of the cucuyo is good but con- 

 tains nothing new. 



The cucujo became so famous as a source of light that its praises 

 were sung by Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas, Seigneur (1544-1590) 

 in La Creation du Monde, which first appeared in 1578. Some early 

 drawings of the insect are still extant. One of these has been pub- 

 lished by Stephan Lorant in The New World, the first pictures of 

 America made by John White and Jacques Le Moyne and engraved 

 by Theodore De Bry (New York, 1946) . The drawing dates from 

 ca. 1585. Woodcuts of the cucujo, said to have been copied from 

 John White's drawings, were also included in the book on insects 

 published by Muffet (1634) , to be considered in a later section. 



Paracelsus and Sixteenth-Century Alchemists 



Despite the innumerable and fantastic procedures to which vari- 

 ous materials were subjected in the alchemists' search for gold, little 

 knowledge of inorganic luminescences appears to have been ob- 

 tained. Such a discovery might have come from men with a medi- 

 cal interest, for example, Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim 

 {ca. 1493-1541) or Paracelsus, the radical Swiss physician and 

 founder of the iatrochemical school, a contemporary of Georg Agri- 

 cola (1490-1555) . Paracelsus' principal interest was in preparation 

 of medicines. He was mostly concerned with inorganic reactions and 

 recommended mineral remedies for illness rather than the " virtues " 

 of plants, regularly used at that period. 



It has been held that one passage from the third book of the 

 Archidoxies, the Theophrastia, indicates that Paracelsus anticipated 

 the discovery of phosphorus, over one hundred years before Hennig 

 Brand of Hamburg prepared his sample in 1669. The particular 

 statement is as follows: ^^ 



^* The hermetic and alchemical writings of Aureoliis Phillipus Theophrastus Bombast 

 of Hohenheim, called Paracelsus the Great, trans, by A. E. Waite, 2: 19, 1894. There 

 is a German translation by Berhard Aschner. Paracelsus Sdmtliche Werke, 4 v., Jena, 

 1926-1932. 



