238 History of Akhi/na/. 



of some expensive chemical product or preparation. He had 

 an heroic remedy for i Iness : when he felt himself seriously 

 indisposed, he took a place in the Edinburgh mail, and having 

 reached that city, immediately came back in the returning coach 

 to London. A cold taken on one of these expeditions terminated 

 in an inflammation of the lungs, of which he died in 1805. 



A few other persons of less note might be quoted as believers 

 in transmutation, but the history of one is that of all ; and, in 

 the emphatic language of Spenser, they were doomed 



" To lose good days that might be better spent, 

 To waste long nights in pensive discontent. 

 To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, 

 To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, 

 To fret their souls with crosses and with cares, 

 To eat their hearts through comfortless despairs : 

 "Unhappy wights ! born to disastrous end, 

 1%at do their lives in tedious tendance spend." 



The sketch which I have given, imperfect and hasty as it has 

 been, of the age of alchymy, will, I trust, suffice to afford a 

 notion of the merits and eccentricities of a race of philosophists, 

 who have certainly gained more credit and reputation than 

 either their objects or success entitled them to. Their history 

 is a tissue of folly, delusion, and imposture. We must, how- 

 ever, in forming this estimate, carefully distinguish between the 

 persons we are now taking leave of, and those who pursued 

 chemistry with the real view of benefitting mankind, and of 

 elucidating attainable objects by experiments, though they pur- 

 sued these ends not altogether independent of alchymical 

 notions. Such men were Van Helmont, Basil Valentine, 

 Beguin, Glauber, Agricola, and perhaps Paracelsus. 

 To these experimentalists we are indebted for a rich and pro- 

 fitable harvest of discoveries, and with them many weighty doc- 

 trines and brilliant discoveries had their origin, which now 

 adorn our science, and of which we daily avail ourselves, for- 

 getful of the fountain whence they flow. But although the 

 alchymists have given us little in the way of useful facts or ap- 

 plicable discoveries, their reign was fruitful in the invention 

 of apparatus. Alembics, stills, retorts, receivers, and a variety 





