OLD AND NEW ALCHEMY 263 



piteous case of James Price. He was a man of fortune, 

 learning, and honor; the University of Oxford conferred 

 upon him, in 1782, a degree of M.D. expressly for his 

 "chemical labors," and he was a distinguished member of 

 the Royal Society. Unfortunately, however, he followed 

 the chimaera of transmutation, and described in a book, 

 which was a nine days' wonder to the gaping world, his 

 successful experiments with the white and the red tinctures 

 for converting mercury into silver and gold respectively. 

 Challenged to repeat them by the Royal Society, he failed 

 to do so, and having swallowed a tumbler full of laurel- 

 water, he died in the presence of the three delegates of that 

 body, in August, 1783. 1 There is little or no doubt that his 

 brain had given way, and that he was the victim, either of 

 his own delusions or of others' fraud. Yet the auri sacra 

 fames was not sated. Frederick the Great, thinking to 

 emulate Croesus, at one time kept a lady alchemist, Frau 

 von Pfuel, busy with powders and fluxes at Potsdam. And 

 the Hermetic Society, founded in 1796 by two Westphalian 

 physicians of consideration, published its transactions and 

 avowed its purposes in the respectable columns of the 

 Deutscher Reichsanzeiger. 



That a cloudy intuition of truth was interwoven with this 

 protracted history of folly and fraud, we now at last know, 

 although most imperfectly. The discovery of radio-active 

 transformations is of yesterday. It dates essentially from 

 the joint investigations in 1903 of Professors Rutherford 

 and Soddy, at the McGill University, Toronto, on the "ema- 

 nation" of thorium, and expressly from June 7 of that 

 year, when Sir William Crookes, in an address delivered 

 at Berlin, gave vivid expression to his doubts as to "the 

 permanent stability of matter." This is only the begin- 

 ning; the end is not yet in view. A new road has been 

 projected; but the engineering difficulties are numerous 

 and formidable. To overcome them will be the great 

 scientific work of the twentieth century. 



dictionary of National Biography, vol. xlvi, page 328. 



