PALINGENESY 



HIS singular delusion may have been partly due 

 to errors of observation, the instruments and 

 methods of former times having been notably 

 crude and unreliable. This fact, taken in con- 

 nection with the wild theories upon which the natural 

 sciences of the middle ages were based, is a sufficient ex- 

 planation of some of the extraordinary statements made by 

 Kircher, Schott, Digby, and others. 



By palingenesy these writers meant a certain chemical 

 process by means of which a plant or an animal might be 

 revived from its ashes. In other words a sort of material 

 resurrection. Most of the accounts given by the old au- 

 thors go no further than to assert that by proper methods 

 the ashes of plants, when treated with water, produce small 

 forests of ferns and pines. Thus, an English chemist, 

 named Coxe, asserts that having extracted and dissolved 

 the essential salts of fern, and then filtered the liquor, he 

 observed, after leaving it at rest for five or six weeks, a 

 vegetation of small ferns adhering to the bottom of the 

 vessel. The same chemist, having mixed northern potash 

 with an equal quantity of sal ammoniac, saw, some time 

 after, a small forest of pines and other trees, with which he 

 was not acquainted, rising from the bottom of the vessel. 



And Kircher tells us in his " Ars Magnetica" that he 

 had a long-necked phial, hermetically sealed, containing 

 the ashes of a plant which he could revive at pleasure by 

 means of heat ; and that he showed this wonderful phe- 



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