124 Van Helmont and the Rise [lect. 



adopted it as indicating that he was a greater than Celsus. 

 While he was quite young, in 1502, his father moved to Villach 

 in Carinthia and there he seems to have spent some of his early 

 days. He is said, at the age of sixteen, to have entered the 

 University of Basel, but soon afterwards to have become the 

 pupil of the Bishop Trithemius at Wlirzburg. Later on he 

 appears to have spent some time in some mines in the Tyrol 

 which were owned by the family Fugger. His personal 

 history, however, especially in his earlier years is wrapt in 

 much uncertainty. 



It would not be fitting to the purpose which 1 have in 

 hand to dwell at length on the life and doings of this 

 remarkable, this picturesque man, whose name has become 

 a by-word for fantastic thought and even for charlatanry. 

 But for the understanding of the genesis of chemical physiology 

 it is necessary to say a few words about him. 



To understand Paracelsus and his work we must, however,, 

 go back to a man of still a generation before. In the latter 

 half of the fifteenth century there lived at Erfurt a Benedictine 

 monk, of whose personal life little is known, one Basil 

 Valentine, whose writings, the principal one of which was his 

 Gurrus triumphalis antimonii, teach us chiefly what can be 

 learnt about him. 



He was one of the alchemists ; but in addition to his 

 inquiries into the properties of metals and his search for the 

 philosopher's stone he busied himself with the nature of drugs, 

 vegetable and mineral, and with their action as remedies for 

 disease. He was no anatomist, no physiologist, but rather 

 what nowadays we should call a pharmacologist. He did not 

 care for the problems of the body, all he sought to understand 

 was how the constituents of the soil and of plants might be 

 treated so as to be available for healing the sick, and how 

 they produced their effects. We apparently owe to him the 

 introduction of many chemical substances, for instance of 

 hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil of vitriol and 

 salt, and of many vegetable drugs. And he apparently was 

 the author of certain conceptions which as we shall see played 

 an important part in the development of chemistry and of 



