hanging against the walls held cucurbits, alembics, descen- 

 sories, Hippocrates' sleeves, mirrors for reflecting the sun's 

 rays in distillations, and a variety of small phials, covered 

 gallipots, and porcelain jars containing chemicals, solid and 

 liquid. 



The floor was strewn with mortars of many shapes and 

 sizes some without their pestles, with fire shovels, tongs and 



pokers, wood for kindling and clumsy axes for chopping the 

 same, and in a corner removed from the dust of furnaces, 

 near a window, lay several ponderous folios and smaller books 

 besides manuscripts of hermetic lore, in some of which the 

 crude drawings had been colored to make them more at- 

 tractive. On wooden pins, driven into crevices of the stone 

 walls at convenient spots, hung utensils identical in shape 



133 



