248 MODERN SCIENCE READER 



divinity, far better skilled in his trade than the halting 

 Olympian of the "Iliad." The Word "chemistry," which 

 probably perpetuates an old appellation for the Nile coun- 

 try, was denned by Suidas in the eleventh century as the 

 art of making gold and silver; and the feasibility of such 

 achievements was intimated by early experiments with a 

 natural alloy. Asem (translated by the Oeeks elektros, 

 "shining") figures prominently in the Egyptian records; 

 it was produced artificially, held a high place in public 

 estimation, and so late as the fifth century A.D. was still by 

 Olympiodorus assigned to the planet Jupiter as his repre- 

 sentative metal. Homer employed electrum in the decora- 

 tion of the palace at Sparta, 1 the renowned owners of which 

 no others than Menelaus and Helen having recently 

 arrived from Egypt, had presumably brought in their train 

 some Egyptian craftsmen. Hesiod made it the ground- 

 work of the Shield of Hercules; and many of the objects 

 excavated at Mycenae and Hissarlik are composed of just 

 the same kind of "white gold" offered by Croesus to the 

 Delphian Treasury. With the lapse of centuries, however, 

 its vogue declined ; the yellow gold of Osiris was preferred 

 to the blanched metal sacred to Isis ; and the planetary ties 

 of electrum were finally severed when mercury, imported 

 by the Carthaginians from the mines of Baetica, became 

 available for its replacement. 



It had, nevertheless, done its work. Its hybrid nature, 

 its mixed qualities, the experienced practicability of endow- 

 ing silver with some of the properties of gold, started the 

 long tradition of alchemistic illusion and imposture. Nor 

 was the case of electrum solitary. Many alloys were known 

 which seemed indistinguishable from pure metals, and the 

 graduated changes in their aspect and nature due to varia- 

 tions in their composition were explained on the crude 

 transmutational theory. Technological practice, then, en- 



^Isewhere in the Odyssey, ^Ae/crpos certainly means amber; but 

 a metallic substance is clearly indicated in the passage above referred 

 to. 



