DISCOVERY OF ALCOHOL AND DISTILLATION. 91 



The separation which is effected in these between volatile water 

 and fixed matter is expressed as follows in the text of Olympiodo- 

 rus, who lived at the beginning of the fifth century : " Earth is 

 taken in the early morning, still impregnated with the dew which 

 the rising sun lifts with its rays. It is then like a widow and de- 

 prived of its spouse, according to the oracles of Apollo. . . . By 

 divine water I mean my dew, aerial water." In the same style 

 Comarius, a writer of the seventh century, drew the allegorical 

 picture of evaporation and the condensation that accompanies it, 

 condensed liquids reacting on the solid products exposed to their 

 action : " Tell us ... how the blessed waters descend from above 

 to visit the dead, stretched out, chained, and loaded down in dark- 

 ness and shadow, in the interior of hades ; . . . how new waters 

 enter in, ... come by the action of the fire ; the cloud holds them 

 up ; it rises from the sea, sustaining the waters." 



This singular language, this enthusiasm borrowing the most 

 exalted religious formulas, need not surprise us. The men of that 

 time, excepting a few superior geniuses, had not reached that 

 state of calm and abstraction that permits the contemplation of 

 scientific verities with a serene coolness. Their education, the 

 symbolical traditions of ancient Egypt, and the gnostic ideas 

 with which the first alchemists were all impregnated, did not 

 allow them to preserve their even balance. They were trans- 

 ported and intoxicated, as it were, by the revelation of that hidden 

 world of chemical transformations which appeared to the human 

 mind for the first time. 



In the first Greek treatises, all the active liquids of chemistry 

 are confounded under the common name of divine water or 

 waters. " Divine water is one in kind," they said ; " but it is mul- 

 tiplied as to species, and admits of an infinite number of varieties 

 and methods of treatment." They designated those varieties by 

 the most various symbolical names, such as aerial water, fluvial 

 water, dew, virginal milk, water of native sulphur, silver water, 

 Attic honey, sea-foam, etc. Confusion was systematically engen- 

 dered by this variety of denominations, for the avowed purpose 

 of concealing the secrets of the alchemical fabrications from the 

 vulgar and uninitiated. Although it is occasionally possible to 

 discern something precise in the deliberate vagueness of the de- 

 scriptions, there does not exist among them, so far as I know, any 

 text that is applicable to the distillation of wine. It is barely pos- 

 sible that the principle of fractional distillation and the diversity 

 of its successive products are indicated in one or two passages, 

 but those passages appear to apply to the treatment of alkaline 

 polysulphides or of organic sulphureted substances, which have 

 nothing in common with alcohol. 



I have not, moreover, met in the Arabic treatises on medicine 



