VII 



THE UNIVERSAL MEDICINE AND THE 

 ELIXIR OF LIFE 



|OVE of life is a characteristic of all animals, man 

 included, and notwithstanding the fact that an 

 occasional individual becomes so dissatisfied with 

 his environment that he commits suicide, and 

 also in the face of the poet's assertion that 



"protracted life is but protracted woe" 



most men and women are of the same way of thinking as 

 Charmian, the attendant on Cleopatra, and " love long life 

 better than figs." And the force of this general feeling is 

 appealed to in the only one of the Mosaic commandments 

 to which a promise is attached, the inducement for honor- 

 ing father and mother being " that thy days may be long 

 in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee." 



No wonder then that the old alchemists dreamed of a 

 universal medicine that would not only prevent or cure 

 sickness but that would renew the youth of the aged and 

 the feeble, for in this, as in most other attempts at discov- 

 ery, the wish was father to the thought. That the renewal 

 of youth in the aged was supposed to be within the ability 

 of the magicians and gods of old, we gather from the stories 

 of Medea and Aeson and the ivory shoulder of Pelops, as 

 referred to in Shakespeare, and explained in the " Shake- 

 speare Cyclopaedia/' 



Of the form of this supposed elixir we know very little 



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