THE PATH OF EVOLUTION 



stars had dominion over health, fortune, riches, birth, 

 life, death, etc., as the stars might enter, or rule over, 

 one or the other of the twelve houses into which the 

 heavens were divided. 



The incidental benefits which these labors, vain in 

 their original purpose, gave to the world, and the 

 discoveries made thereby have been of incalculable 

 value. Almost all that was known in chemistry, in 

 medicine and metallurgy, as late as the middle of the 

 eighteenth century, has been its legacy. But the facts 

 collected were necessarily disconnected, of conflicting 

 and uncertain value; a heterogeneous mass of recipes, 

 products and compounds, into which little or no 

 attempt had been made to introduce systematic classi- 

 fication or scientific order. 



Another cause, more potent still, held back with 

 iron hand the advance of science; this was the belief 

 of the church and of the people in witchcraft and in the 

 demonic powers that Alchemy could invoke. From 

 what has been said of the Platonic theories of the 

 constitution of the substance i. e., the union of the 

 inform Matter without body, shape or substance, with 

 the creative spirit or the essence of the Form it is evi- 

 dent that the substance, with its accident or peculiar 

 qualities, depended upon the said Form, essence or spirit. 

 The Church asserted that this spirit was the Divine 



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