208 NATURE AND LIFE. 



stone is the region in which the seeds of the future are 

 slowly germinating. That phantom of the elixir of life is 

 the step to a vast number of experimental attempts, from 

 which the healing art gains profit in spite of them. In 

 the general belief that every thing remains unmoving and 

 wrapped in darkness, it will be found that, as early as the 

 fifteenth century, the schools of Arabia and Salerno on the 

 one hand, and the alchemists on the other, added a mul- 

 titude of precious substances to the stores of the materia 

 medica, such as several salts of antimony, sal-saturni, liver 

 of sulphur, ether, ammonia, red precipitate, nitric, sul- 

 phuric, and muriatic acid, alcohol, etc. 



Thus, when Paracelsus drew the attention of Europe to 

 himself at the opening of the sixteenth century, the time 

 was favorable to the design of that renowned physician. 

 Paracelsus is the chief promoter of chemical therapeutics, 

 and has thus exerted very great influence upon the destiny 

 of medicine. He first put forward chemistry as the true 

 method of preparing medicines, attacked the abuse of the 

 complicated and often inert mixtures of Galen's polyphar- 

 macy,- and brought to view the need of isolating the quin- 

 tessences, the active principles of simples. He restored 

 the almost forgotten opium to credit. He preached the 

 use of powerful substances taken from the mineral king- 

 dom, and showed the efficacy in medicine of the salts of 

 mercury, of iron, arsenic, antimony, tin, gold, etc. His 

 fortunate cures were as famous as his irregular life was. 

 Paracelsus retained the forms of diction in use among his 

 contemporaries, and even carried them to excess. His , 

 works abound in the mystical phrases of theosophy and 

 the cabala, but he was at bottom a man of thoroughly 

 emancipated mind, whose boasting may be pardoned in 

 recollection of the opposition he met, and whose seeming 

 madness we excuse when we remember the correctness of 

 his fundamental ideas. 



