CHEMISTRY AND ALCHEMY. 179 



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was not above preparing his own remedies and instruments, heralded, by the 

 independence of his ideas and their practical applicability, a new era for 

 M-ience, amidst the misty subtleties of Islamism. Avenzoar and Averroos 

 were the principal apostles of this luminous doctrine, which seemed destined 

 to ilhimimite in a short time the whole scientific world. Unfortunately the 

 human intellect was easily dragged out of its depth in the Middle Ages. 

 The investigators and inventors, such as the learned Morienus, who fled from 

 Rome into the deserts of Egypt (Fig. 149), had great difficulty in steering 

 clear of the shoals of experimental science in a century when the operations 

 of what was called the art of frc were confounded with magic. Their 

 labours in chemistry and metallurgy might have caused them to be con- 

 demned as sorcerers. 



The Court of Rome deserves praise for its good sense in that, disregarding 

 popular superstitions, it summoned from his cell a humble Dominican monk, 

 afterwards Albertus Magnus, to make him master of the Sacred Palace, and 

 subsequently Bishop of Ratisbon (1260). But, as we have already said (see the 

 chapter on Philosophical Sciences), this philosopher monk, after he had been 

 made bishop, wearying of earthly greatness and pomp, abandoned them without 

 a sigh for the exclusion of the cloister, in order to pursue in silence his 

 favourite scientific researches. This was why he was believed to be in com- 

 munication with the powers of darkness, and it was said that he was guilty 

 of magic, and that he made gold. People came from all parts to see him and 

 question him as to the abstract arts of chemistry. His recipes were in great 

 request, his manuscripts were copied by the thousand, and posterity, which 

 has forgotten all about the monk and bishop, and which does not read his 

 numerous philosophical works, still repeats with honour the name of the 

 (iri'iit Albert. 



It must not be imagined that the princes and sovereigns of the Middle 

 Ages looked at the interests of science from as lofty a point of view as many 

 of the popes. Nevertheless, a French king, whose venerated memory was 

 mercilessly aspersed by the philosophers of the last century, Louis IX., 

 employed as tutor for his children a Dominican monk, the Pliny, the Varro of 

 the Middle Ages. This was Vincent of Beauvais, the wonderful encycloptedist, 

 who lived, so to speak, amongst the ancients at a time when their most splen- 

 did works were despised and reviled. Vincent of Beauvais was accused of 

 sorcery because he avoided the idle discussions of the schools, in order to 



