HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



Hippocratists with equal impetuosity. But he deserves best to be re- 

 membered for having introduced into medicine certain compounds of 

 the metals which are, even at the present, reckoned among the most 

 potent resources of the physician. He regarded the human body as 

 itself a chemical compound, and he supposed disease to be produced 



FIG. 43. PARACELSUS. 



by chemical changes, and to be successfully treated only by chemical 

 preparations. The doctrines of Paracelsus gave rise to no little con- 

 troversy amongst the physicians of the sixteenth century, many of 

 whom showed themselves stout defenders of the supreme authority of 

 the ancients. 



That branch of Practical Chemistry which relates to the extraction of 

 metals from their ores had of course been, from the earliest ages, the 

 subject of a blind and limited experience ; but, in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, metallurgical processes became, in the hands of AGRICOLA (1494 

 1555), matters for scientific study. It was the fashion about this 

 period for authors to translate their native names into Latin, or some- 

 times into Greek, and hence it is under these classic forms that the 

 names of the men of learning of the sixteenth century are known. The 



