i go CHEMISTRY AND ALCHEMY. 



everything grand or mysterious was attributed by the alchemists to the 

 demons which people the air, fire, and water, to the stars which are superior 

 to the human and to the Divine will, to mysterious sympathies existing 

 between the Creator and his creatures, and to the hybrid combinations 

 of mineral and vegetable substances. The fifteenth century followed, in 

 regard to the arts and sciences, the errors of the preceding age, which was 

 full of grand manifestations, which are to be traced in those wonderful 

 Gothic monuments in which the statuary has represented a mass of figures, 

 sacred and profane, real and imaginary, and which give one the impression 

 of being a book of alchemy, written with a chisel upon stone. And yet, 

 amidst this passion for the strange and the supernatural, there were a 

 few patient and laborious scholars who only devoted themselves to the 

 operations of the laboratory in order to increase the progress of chemistry by 

 logical experiment. Such was the Italian John Baptist Porta, who was the 

 first to allude to the tree of Diana and the flowers of tin, and who discovered 

 the means of reducing the metallic oxides and of colouring silver ; or, again, 

 Isaac and Jean Hollandus, makers of enamel and of artificial gems, who have 

 described their process of work with great minuteness and precision ; or, 

 again, Sidonius and Sendivogius, who put into execution several new 

 processes for dyeing stuffs. 



In 1488 the Venetian Government, following the example of Henry VII. 

 of England and several other monarchs of the time, issued a severe interdict 

 against alchemist practices, but the men who pretended to make gold 

 continued their so-called transmutations. At this epoch it was that the 

 Rosicrucians formed, under the name of Voarchodumia, a secret association, 

 the principal object of which was 'the discovery of gold and silver mines, 

 and, above all, that of the great work (Figs. 135 and 136). In the six- 

 teenth century science began to free itself from the ancient routine of the 

 Middle Ages, and to seek a road in which she might use reason as a staff, 

 and observation as a lantern to her path. And, strange to say, it was 

 alchemy which took the initiative of this scientific reform. Paracelsus (born 

 at Einsiedlen, in Switzerland, in 1493), to whom frequent allusion was made 

 in a previous chapter (Medical and Occult Sciences), may be considered the 

 most characteristic type of contemporary alchemists. He represented, so to 

 speak, two men combined in one : upon the one hand, there was the daring 

 reformer who upset all the received ideas of medicine since the days of 



