262 MODERN SCIENCE READER 



needs of the poor. His portrait bears the inscription com- 

 posed by himself: 



Alterius ne sit, qui suus esse potest. 



He was incidentally, not exclusively, an alchemist. 

 Therapeutic chemistry ranked higher in his esteem than 

 metallurgic chemistry. Yet the creed of the adepts con- 

 tinued to be held widely and long. Robert Boyle, one of 

 the chief ornaments of the Royal Society, firmly adhered 

 to it; so did Glauber, Kunkel, Stahl, the prophet of phlo- 

 giston, and Boerhaave, eminent at the University of Leyden 

 in the eighteenth century. Helvetius and Van Helmont 

 fell abjectly into the trap of the delusion. Each in turn 

 received from an unknown hand a specimen of the philoso- 

 pher's stone, and each in turn verified (as he supposed) 

 its supramundane power for the aurification of mercury 

 or lead. Even the great Tycho Brahe had a narrow escape. 

 It needed the celestial summons of the new star of 1572 to 

 rescue him from the hermetic slough. Many German 

 princes, too, favored the " Divine art." Rudolph II was 

 styled the German Trismegistus ; John the Alchemist, 

 Burggrave of Nuremberg, practised it in person ; Augustus 

 I, Elector of Saxony, and his consort Anna of Denmark, 

 explored its mysteries in gorgeous laboratories. Later it 

 fell into disrepute. Its votaries foregathered with the 

 brethren of the Rosy Cross, and many of them trod devious 

 and dangerous ways. Some came to tragical ends. Alex- 

 ander Seton, author of "Novum Lumen Chemicum," was, 

 with futile cruelty, tortured to death at Dresden in 1603, 

 in the hope of wringing from him a golden secret which 

 he bequeathed, probably in good faith, to his Polish pro- 

 tector, Michael Sendivogius. 1 He had a fellow-sufferer, 

 after the lapse of a century, in the Neapolitan adept 

 Caetano, surnamed the "Conte Ruggiero," who was hanged 

 at Berlin in 1709 on a gallows glittering, by a grim mock- 

 ery, with gold tinsel. Finally, there was the strange and 



'A. E. Waite, A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature's Marvels, 

 by Benedictus Figulus, Preface to English translation. 



