254 MODERN SCIENCE READER 



culture. Alchemistic principles especially flourished rankly 

 within the congenial precincts of New Rome. They en- 

 listed many adherents and encountered few opponents, their 

 truth being (it would seem) tacitly admitted even by those 

 who sought no profit from their momentous consequences. 

 After the Hegira, the Arabs seized the scepter of learning, 

 and Bagdad far and away outbid Byzantium. The fol- 

 lowers of the Prophet, no less keen for knowledge than for 

 conquest, assimilated indiscriminately everything cogni- 

 zable by the mind of man that came in their way, and hur- 

 ried down blind alleys as eagerly as along open roads. 

 They made ideal adepts, and carried acquaintance with 

 the wonder-working Magisterium with them to Spain, 

 whence it spread to the courts, universities, monasteries, 

 and market-places of medieval Europe. The visions of 

 perennial wealth and health which it engendered kindled 

 the imaginations of the ignorant; they admirably served 

 the purposes of the diversified brood of mystery-mongers; 

 kings and princes hoped to raise revenues ad libitum 

 through the metamorphic action of their croslets and alem- 

 bics; and the possibility of so doing received the sanction 

 of the highest intellects. All the known analogies of nature 

 seemed, five or six centuries ago, to justify the conviction 

 that metals were transformable. It ran counter to no 

 ascertained or imaginable law of nature ; it rested upon no 

 extravagant assumptions. The sought-for changes, looked 

 at dispassionately, might be thought easier of realization 

 than the processes of reduction, by which lumps of stone 

 and clay assumed the properties of iron, copper, or mercury. 

 Plausible in itself, alchemistic doctrine was further recom- 

 mended by a choir of consonant authorities. Antiquity 

 almost unanimously enforced it ; Eastern sages, profoundly 

 versed in the arcana of nature and art, were said to have 

 adopted it; and the spurious character of the evidence al- 

 leged in its support was a matter of indifference in that 

 uncritical age. Authentic or apocryphal, the names and 

 maxims arrayed in favor of the spagyric philosophy availed 



