German alchemist Botticher, imprisoned in the royal castle 

 of Konigstein for numerous attempts to swindle his Highness, 

 the Elector of Saxony, happily saved himself from severer 

 punishment by discovering the process of manufacturing por- 

 celain, justly celebrated as Dresden porcelain to this day. 



The Hollander, Cornelius Drebbel, after leaving Prague, 

 discovered the superb red dyestuff obtained by the action of 

 tinsalts on cochineal; this preparation of tin having been 

 itself discovered thirty years before by another alchemist and 

 long called by his name the "fuming liquor of Libavius." 



"The search itself rewards the pains ; 



So though the chymist his great secret miss, 



For neither it in art nor nature is, 



Yet things well worth his toil he gains, 



And does his charge and labor pay 



With good unsought experiments by the way." 



The mediaeval alchemists are credited also with being the 

 first to seize the grand idea of evolution in its widest extent 

 as a "progress from the imperfect to the more perfect, in- 

 cluding lifeless as well as living nature in an unceasing pro- 

 gression, in which all things take part, towards a higher and 

 nobler state. In this slow development nature has no need 

 to hasten, she has eternity to work in; it is for us to ascer- 

 tain the favoring conditions and by imitating them or 

 increasing them to accelerate the work." (Draper.) 



The contributions to chemical science made by the inde- 

 fatigable alchemists were not appreciated in their day and 

 failed to demolish the belief in transmutation, because the 

 isolated discoveries were not correlated by general laws ; it 

 is true that the alchemists propounded a theory that three 

 principles, designated symbolically as "salt," "sulfur" and 

 "mercury," were the basis of all substances, but it remained 

 for Becher and Stahl in the seventeenth century to formulate 



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