CHEMISTRY AND ITS DEVELOPMENT 201 



the soul of nature than either of these bodies. He appears, 

 indeed, to have thought it the primary matter, or the 

 radical source of all things an opinion held by Thales, 

 the father of Greek speculation. Thomas Aquinas also 

 wrote on alchemy, and was the first to employ the word 

 amalgam. Ramond Lulty is another great name in the 

 annals of alchemy. His writings are much more disfigured 

 by unintelligible jargon than those of Bacon and Albertus 

 Magnus. He was the first to introduce the use of chemical 

 symbols, his system consisting of a scheme of arbitrary 

 hieroglyphics. He made much of the spirit of wine (the 

 art of distilling spirits would seem then to have been 

 recent), imposing on it the name of aqua vitae ardens. In 

 his enthusiasm he pronounced it the very elixir of life. 



But more famous than all was Paracelsus (1493-1541, 

 A.D.), in whom alchemy proper may be said to have cul- 

 minated. He held that the elements of compound bodies 

 were salt, sulphur and mercury representing respectively 

 earth, air and water; fire being already regarded as an 

 imponderable but these substances were in his system 

 purely representative. All kinds of matter were reducible 

 under one or the other of these typical forms ; every thing 

 was either a salt, a sulphur, or a mercury, or, like the 

 metals, it was a "mixt" or compound. There was one ele- 

 ment, however, common to the four ; a fifth essence or 

 "quintessence" of creation; an unknown and only true 

 element, of which the four generic principles were nothing 

 but derivative forms or embodiments. In other words, 

 Paracelsus inculcated the dogma that there is only one 

 real elementary matter nobody knows what. This one 

 prime element of things he appears to have believed to be 

 the one universal solvent of which the alchemists were in 

 quest, and to express which he introduced the term 

 alcakest% word of unknown etymology but supposed by 

 some to be composed of two German words all' Geist, "all 

 spirit/' He seems to have had the notion that if this fifth 

 essence or quintessence could be got at, it would prove to 



