226 NOTES ON CHINESE MATERIA MEDICA. 



iseo 62. ardently studied by the Chinese. It is moreover a matter of 

 Alchemy, history that intercourse between China and P ersia was fre- 

 quent both before and after the Mohammedan conquest of the 

 latter country; that embassies from Persia, as well as from 

 Arabs, and even from the Greeks in Constantinople, visited the 

 court of the Chinese emperor in Shansi; that Arab traders 

 settled in China, and that there was frequent intercourse by sea 

 between China and the Persian Gulf; that China had an 

 extensive alchemical literature anterior to the period when 

 alchemy was studied in the West. All these facts go to prove 

 that that pseudo-science originated not with the disciples of 

 Mohammed, but that it was borrowed by them from the 

 Chinese. 



Philosopher's With regard to the philosopher's stone, it is remarkable that 

 stone. w hii e the alchemists of the West have spoken with doubt as to 

 what it was, with the Chinese its identity appears hardly to 

 have been questioned. That wonderful body which, when used as 

 a chemical agent, was supposed to have the power of convert- 

 ing other metals into gold, and, when employed as a medicine, of 

 conferring immunity from death, is, according to the writings of 



Marco Polo, the Chinese alchemists, Cinnabar. Marco Polo notices this idea, 

 that sulphur and mercury are capable of prolonging life. Of 

 the Cingui (i.e. Chugi, the Jogis in India), he says : " These 

 are longer lived than other people, for they live from 150 to 200 

 years .... for I tell you they take quicksilver and sulphur, 

 and they mix them together and make a drink of them .... 

 and they say that it lengthens their life .... and they do 

 this twice every month .... These people use this drink 

 from their infancy, in order to live longer, and without fail, 

 those who live so long as I have told you, use this drink of 

 quicksilver and sulphur." Quoted in the Art. " Marco Polo and 

 his Recent Editors," in Quarterly Review, July 1868. 



Ko-hung, author of the Pau p'uh tsi p'ian, a work of the 

 fourth century of undoubted genuineness, enumerates various 

 mineral and vegetable productions possessing in different degrees 



Elixir Vita, the properties of an Elixir Vitce. Of the first of them, Cinna- 

 bar, he writes in terms thus translated by Mr. Edkins : 



