CHEMISTRY AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 199 



gold and silver to be burned. For at that time multitudes 

 of books on this art were appearing, written by Alexandrine 

 monks and by hermits, but bearing famous names of 

 antiquity, such as Democritus, Pythagoras and Hermes. 



At a later period the Arabs took up the art, and it is 

 to them that European alchemy is directly traceable. The 

 school of polypharmacy, as it has been called, flourished in 

 Arabia during the caliphate of Abbassides. The earliest 

 work of this school now known is the Summa Perfedionis, 

 or "Summit of Perfection", composed by Geber about the 

 eighth century; it is consequently the oldest book on 

 chemistry proper in the world. It contains so much of 

 what sounds like jargon to modern ears, that Dr. Johnson 

 ascribes the origin of the word "gibberish" to the name of 

 the compiler. Yet, when viewed in its true light, it is a 

 wonderful performance. It is a kind of text-book, or col- 

 lection of all that was then known and believed. It ap- 

 pears that these Arabian polypharmacists had long been 

 engaged in firing and boiling, dissolving and precipitating, 

 subliming and coagulating chemical substances. They 

 worked with gold and mercury, arsenic and sulphur, salts 

 and acids, and had, in short, become familiar with a large 

 range of what are now called chemicals. Geber taught 

 that there are three elemental chemicals mercury, sul- 

 phur and arsenic. These substances, especially the first 

 two, seem to have fascinated the thoughts of the alchemists 

 by their potent and penetrating qualities. They saw mer- 

 cury dissolve gold, the most incorruptible of matters, as 

 water dissolves sugar; and a stick of sulphur presented to 

 hot iron penetrates it like a spirit, and makes it run down 

 in a shower of solid drops, a new and remarkable substance 

 possessed of properties belonging to neither iron nor to 

 sulphur. The Arabians held that the metals are com- 

 pound bodies, made up of mercury and sulphur in differ- 

 ent proportions. With these very excusable errors in 

 theory, they were genuine practical chemists. They toiled 

 away at the art of making "many medicines" (poly- 



