152 Sylvius and his Pupils. [lect. 



" Gold fermentation is the ****** an d is produced 

 "without any heat. Of this kind is that when coral is dis- 

 solved in vinegar." 



This confusion of fermentation, properly so called, with the 

 effervescence due to the escape of gas from simple direct 

 chemical action, though undoubtedly a retrograde step, may 

 be regarded with leniency when we reflect that it was only one 

 of many indications of the special attitude of Sylvius's mind, 

 through which, though he went too far, he did good service by 

 shewing that the importance and pertinency to physiology of 

 van Helmont's chemical views might be recognized without 

 accepting his spiritualistic speculations. 



Sylvius followed van Helmont in so far as the latter in- 

 sisted that many of the phenomena of the living body were to 

 be explained by the help of chemical science as the outcome 

 of chemical processes, a view which physiologists had before 

 van Helmont too much neglected ; but he refused to follow 

 him in regarding chemical changes as mere instruments in 

 the hands of occult spiritual agencies. On the contrary he 

 boldly asserted that the chemistry of living things was the 

 same as the chemistry of so-called dead things, that what took 

 place in a live body was the same as that which might be made 

 to take place in a flask in the laboratory. And filled as his 

 mind was with the striking results which he had obtained in 

 the laboratory as he worked with salts, with acids, and with 

 bases, he jumped to the conclusion that the chemistry of the 

 living body was of the same order, and that an adequate 

 knowledge of acids and alkalis was the key to the interpretation 

 of the problems of life. 



In taking up this position he performed at least one useful 

 task, he brought the chemical investigation of physiological 

 problems into line w T ith the mechanical and physical investiga- 

 tion of them. The spiritualistic fancies of van Helmont, and 

 still more the earlier ones of Paracelsus, had had the tendency to 

 make men think that chemical inquiry in contrast with physical 

 inquiry was in some way necessarily bound up with speculations 

 about invisible agencies of a spiritual kind ; and this doubtless 

 was more or less a bar to men of sober and exact thought 



