196 CHEMISTRY AND ALCHEMY. 



crow's head, of the black blacker than the black, of the seal of Mercury, of 

 the mud of wisdom, and other countless absurdities of a like kind. As to 

 the science itself, in which I am well versed, and which must not be 

 confounded with the trade made out of it, I believe it to be worthy of the 

 honour which Thucydides says should be paid to an honest woman : that of 

 talking about her as little as possible." Agrippa has also left a very graphic 

 description of the sad condition to which the alchemists of the lower ranks 

 were then reduced, "travelling from fair to fair, in order to make a little 

 money by sale of white-lead, vermilion, antimony, and other drugs used by 

 women for painting the face, drugs which the Scripture calls ointments of 

 lust." These bastards of science stole when they could not earn money, and 

 finally resorted to the coining of false money (Fig. 148). They were, as 

 Agrippa called them, " gaol-birds." Such were the surviving alchemists in 

 France in the reign of Frai^ois I., and they were far more calculated to 

 discredit the spirit of experimentalising than to bring it into favour amongst 

 the upper classes. The famous Nicholas Flamel had adopted very different 

 means from these, a hundred and fifty years before, to make himself popular 

 amongst the people of Paris. A sworn professor of the University, a 

 philosopher, a naturalist, and doubtless also an alchemist, Flamel enjoyed 

 a reputation for probity which had probably not less to do with his wealth 

 than the cause of the holy stone, so long held in bad repute. People did not 

 stop to inquire whether fortunate speculations or sums of money deposited 

 with him by proscribed Jews who died without heirs and beyond the frontiers 

 of France had increased a hundred-fold the modest savings of the scribe 

 of the parish, St. Jacques do la Boucherie ; the common people, always ready 

 to believe in the supernatural, attributed his large fortune exclusively to 

 alchemy, and long after his death no citizen of Paris would have dared to 

 pass the house of Flamel and Pernelle, his wife, at night without signing 

 himself, so as to keep off the evil spirits which were believed to haunt the 

 abode in which the alchemist concealed his treasure. Yet Flamel, at his 

 death, founded masses for the repose of his soul in all the churches of Paris, 

 and bequeathed his goods to the poor. 



The great good fortune of Nicholas Flamel no doubt helped to advance 

 experimental science, but it led thousands of enthusiasts astray, and the 

 search for the philosopher's stone became the mania of the fifteenth century. 

 An ancient author, who did not at all favour the alchemists, says of them, 



