590 COSMOS. 



advances of chemistry, are so much the more important as 

 they imparted a knowledge of the heterogeneous character of 

 matter, and the nature of forces not made manifest by motion, 

 but which now led to the recognition of the importance of com- 

 position, no less than to that of the perfectibility of form assumed 

 in accordance with the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato. 

 Differences of form and of composition are, however, the 

 elements of all our knowledge of matter, the abstractions 

 which we believe capable, by means of measurement and 

 analysis, of enabling us to comprehend the whole universe. 



It is difficult, at present, to decide what the Arabian 

 chemists may have acquired through their acquaintance with 

 Indian literature (the writings on the Rasayand] ;* from the 

 ancient technical arts of the Egyptians ; the new alchemistic 

 precepts of the pseudo-Democritus and the sophist Synesius ; 

 or even from Chinese sources, through the agency of the 

 Moguls. According to the recent and very careful investiga- 

 tions of a celebrated Oriental scholar, M. Reinaud, the inven- 

 tion of gunpowder,f and its application to the discharge of 

 hollow projectiles, must not be ascribed to the Arabs. 

 Hassan Al-Rammah, who wrote between 1285 and 1295, was 

 not acquainted with this application; whilst even in the 

 twelfth century, and therefore nearly two hundred years 



* The chemistry of the Indians, embracing alchemistic arts, is called 

 rasdyana (rasa, juice or fluid, also quicksilver; and ay ana, course or 

 process), and forms, according to Wilson, the seventh division of the 

 dyur- Veda, the "science of life, or of the prolongation of life." (Royle, 

 Hindoo Medicine, pp. 39-48.) The Indians have been acquainted from 

 the earliest times (Royle, p. 131) with the application of mordants in 

 calico or cotton printing, an Egyptian art, which is most clearly described 

 in Pliny, lib. xxxv. cap. 11, No. 150. The word "chemistry" indicates 

 literally " Egyptian art," the art of the black land ; for Plutarch (de Iside 

 et Osir. cap. 33) knew that the Egyptians called their country Xij^La, 

 from the black earth. The inscription on the Kosetta stone has Chmi. 

 I find this word, as applied to the analytic art, first in the decrees of 

 Diocletian against " the old writings of the Egyptians which treat of 

 the '%?7jLua' of gold and silver," (TT^L ^fiiag apyvpov KCLI \pvoov). 

 Compare my Examen crit. de I hist, de la Geographie et de lAstrono- 

 mie nautique, t. ii. p. 314. 



f Reinaud et Fave, du Feu, gregeois, des Feux, de guerre et des 

 origines de lapoudre a canon, t. i. 1845, pp. 89, 97, 201 and 211; 

 Piobert, Traite d'Artillerie, 1836, p. 25; Beckmann, Technologie t 

 8. 342. 



