NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 25 



the world was not ready Basil Valentine. His discoveries an- 

 ticipated much that has brought fame and fortune to chemists 

 since, yet so fearful of danger was he that his work was carefully 

 concealed. Not until after his death was his treatise on alchemy 

 found, and even then it was for a long time not known where and 

 when he lived. The papal bull, Spondent pariter, and the various 

 prohibitions it bred, forcing other alchemists to conceal their 

 laboratories, led him to let himself be known during his life at 

 Erfurt simply as an apothecary, and to wait until after his death 

 to make a revelation of truth, which during his lifetime might 

 have cost him dear. Among the legacies of this greatest of the 

 alchemists was the doctrine that the air which asphyxiates work- 

 ers in mines is similar to that which is produced by fermen- 

 tation of malt, and a recommendation that in order to drive away 

 the evil and to prevent serious accidents, fires be lighted and jets 

 of steam used to ventilate the mines, laying stress especially upon 

 the idea that the danger in the mines is produced by " exhalations 

 of metals." 



Thanks to men like Valentine, this idea of the interference of 

 Satan and his minions with the mining industry was gradually 

 weakened, and the working of the deserted mines was resumed ; 

 yet, even at a comparatively recent period, we find it still linger- 

 ing, and among leading divines in the very heart of Protestant 

 Germany. In 1715 a cellar-digger having been stifled at Jena, 

 the medical faculty of the university decided that the cause was 

 not the direct action of the devil, but a deadly gas. Thereupon 

 Prof. Loescher, of the University of Wittenberg, entered a sol- 

 emn protest, declaring that the decision of the medical faculty 

 was " only a proof of the lamentable license which has so taken 

 possession of us, and which, if we are not earnestly on our guard, 

 will finally turn away from us the blessing of God." * But de- 

 nunciations of this kind could not hold back the little army of 

 science. In the last half of the eighteenth century Black, Priestley, 

 and especially Bergmann, rooted out the very foundations of the 

 whole theologic theory, and one more phantom which had long 

 troubled the earth was at last driven forth forever, f 



Thus, in spite of adverse influences, the evolution of the physi- 

 cal sciences went on. More and more there rose men bold enough 

 to break away from the theological method, and strong enough to 

 resist the enticements or threats of ecclesiasticism. Alchemy in 



* For Loescher's protest, see Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens, etc., 

 vol. i, p. 319. 



f For the general view of noxious gases as imps of Satan, see Hoefer, Histoire de la 

 Chimie, vol. i, p. 350, vol. ii, p. 48. For the work of Black, Priestley, Bergmann, and others, 

 see main authorities already cited, and especially the admirable paper of Dr. R. G. Ecclea 

 on The Evolution of Chemistry, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1891. 



