CHEMISTRY AND ALCHEMY. 



from, a medical point of view, and metallurgy, or the art of extracting and 

 purifying metals for the use of industry two sciences having many points 

 of contact and of difference advanced in parallel lines upon the road of 

 progress. Alchemy, ceasing to be experimental and becoming merely 

 psychological, was abandoned to the study of a few fanatical adherents, and 

 finally disappeared altogether from the enlarged domain of positive science. 

 A history of the conflict between the psychological alchemists and the 

 chimiasfres (or new chemists) would b3 a very interesting one, especially if it 

 related how the genius of the Middle Ages gradually lost the ground which 

 it had held for so many centuries ; but the place for such a history is not 



Figs. 142 and 1 43. Furnaces, as used by the Chemists and Alchemists of the Middle Ages. 

 After an Engraving by Vriese. 



here. We can only summarise the salient facts, deducing from them 

 afterwards the principal consequences. The conflict was fiercest upon the 

 banks of the Rhine. While Graterole, Bracheschus, and Alexander of 

 Suchten sided with the alchemists, and upheld the speculative theories of 

 Avicenna, Gerber, and Raymond Lulli, Conrad Gesner, Thomas Mufetus, 

 and Nicholas Guibert examined the science by the light of the ideas which 

 had inaugurated the new period. 



In the meanwhile, Cornelius Agrippa, the sceptic, who from his 

 childhood had been familiar with the mysteries of alchemy, and even of 

 necromancy, was tracing the line which separated science from speculation, 



