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CHAPTER I. 



IMPROVEMENT OF THE NOTION OF CHEMICAL ANA- 

 LYSIS. AND RECOGNITION OF IT AS THE SPAGIRIC 

 ART. 



THE doctrine of " the four elements" is one of 

 the oldest monuments of man's speculative na- 

 ture; goes back, perhaps, to times anterior to Greek 

 philosophy; and, as the doctrine of Aristotle and 

 Galen, reigned for fifteen hundred years over the 

 Gentile, Christian, and Mohammedan world. In 

 medicine, taught as the doctrine of the four " ele- 

 mentary qualities," of which the human body and 

 all other substances are compounded, it had a very 

 powerful and extensive influence upon medical prac- 

 tice. But this doctrine never led to any attempt 

 actually to analyze bodies into their supposed ele- 

 ments ; for composition was inferred from the re- 

 semblance of the qualities, not from the separate 

 exhibition of the ingredients ; the supposed analysis 

 was, in short, a decomposition of the body into 

 adjectives, not into substances. 



This doctrine, therefore, may be considered as a 

 negative state, antecedent to the very beginning of 

 chemistry ; and some progress beyond this mere 

 negation was made, as soon as men began to en- 

 deavour to compound and decompound substances 

 by the use of fire or mixture, however erroneous 



