THE BIRTH OF CHEMISTRY 
VIII. 
eneral Character of Alchemy and the Alchemists.—The Pretiosa 
Margarita Novella.—An Alchemistical Allegory. —Alchemical 
Symbols— Paracelsus, —Libavius. 
‘ wrt manner of men were the Alchemists? How did they 
preserve, cultivate, and transmit the wonderful delusions of 
their creed? We have endeavoured in a former article to show 
that the idea of transmutation arose from the old Greek idea of 
the conversion of one element into another ; and the belief in 
the possibility of transmutation once admitted, the pursuit of the 
alchemist would naturally follow in a mystical and credulous 
age. As to the men themselves, their character was twofold ; 
for there was your alchemist proper, your true enthusiast, your 
ardent, persevering worker, who believed heart and soul that 
gold could be made, and that by long search or close study of 
‘the works of his predecessors, he could find the Philosopher’s 
stone ; and there was your knavish alchemist, a man who had 
‘wits enough to perceive that the search was futile, and impudence 
enough to dupe more credulous people than himself, and wheedle 
heir fortunes out of them on pretence of returning it tenfold in 
the shape of a recipe for converting lead into gold. These last 
we may dismiss at once. They abounded during the Middle Ages, 
and found easy dupes, whom they deceived by the most shallow 
tricks, as by placing a piece of gold in the crucible of transmuta- 
tion together with volatile substances, and after many processes 
and much heating, they would show the little button of metal 
which had all along been present. 
__ Of the true alchemist we have many pictures, The alchemist, 
the astrologer, the mystic, the wizard, were men of the same 
stamp. They often practised the same arts side by side. The 
‘same habit and attitude of thought belonged to one and to all, 
and became all equally well. Take the dreamy, maudlin, semi- 
maniacal Althotas, who has been described so well by Dumas :— 
“An old man, with grey eyes, a hooked nose, and trembling 
‘but busyhands. He was half-buried in a great chair, and turned 
with his right hand the leaves of a parchment manuscript.” 
Note also his intense abstraction, his forgetfulness of the hour, the 
day, the year, the age, the country; his absolute and intense 
selfishness, and absorption, the concentration of the whole powers 
of his soul upon his one object. Or let us look at Victor Hugo’s 
Archidiacre de St. Josas, in his search for the unseen, the 
unknown, and the altogether uncanny ; the bitterness of his soul, 
his passionate musings, his conjurations and invocations in an 
unknown tongue ; his own self, that wonderful mixture of theo- 
logian, scholar, mystic, perhaps not much unlike the divine 
'S. Thomas Aquinas himself. Listen to his musings: ‘‘ Yes, so 
Manon said, and Zoroaster taught :—the sun is born of fire, the 
moon of the sun ; fire is the soul of the universe ; its elementary 
particles are diffused and in constant flow throughout the world, 
by an infinite number of channels. At the points where these 
currents cross each other in the heavens they produce light, at 
their points of intersection they produce gold. Light !—gold ! 
‘the same thing; fire in its concrete state. . . .. What! this 
light that bathes my hand is gold? The first the particles 
dilated according to a certain law, the second the same particles 
condensed according to another law! . . . For some time, said 
he, with a bitter smile, I have failed in all my experiments ; 
one idea possesses me, and scorches my brain like a seal of fire. 
T have not so much as been able to discover the secret of Cassio- 
dorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil—a thing simple 
enough in itself.” If we peep into Dom Clande’s cell, we are 
introduced to a typical alchemist’s laboratory—a gloomy, dimly- 
lighted place, full of strange vessels, and es, and melting 
pots, spheres, and portions of skeletons hanging from the ceiling ; 
the floor littered with stone bottles, pans, charcoal, aludels, and 
alembics, great parchment books covered with hieroglyphics ; 
the bellows with its motto Spira, Spera; the hour-glass, the astro- 
labe, and over all cobwebs, and dust, and ashes. The walls covered 
with various aphorisms of the brotherhood ; legendsand memorials 
in many tongues ; passages from the Smaragdine Table of Hermes 
Trismegistus;tjand looming out from all in greatcapitals, ANATKH. 
Yet once again, look at Faust, as depicted by Rembrandt, or 
Teniers, unknown alchemist, if you wish for an alchemical 
interior. 
__ But the hard-working and enthusiastic alchemist did not always 
follow the ideal of the novelist and artist ; he often degenerated 
into a ‘‘dirty, soaking fellow,” who lost what little learning he 
ever had by concentrating his mind on the one dominant topic, 
=_——e 
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until it excluded every other idea and aspiration ; then the pur- 
suit became all absorbing, and the disciple of the arta mere 
drivelling monomaniac. 
We will now look at one of the books which were cherished 
by the alchemists. Here is a little vellum-covered A/dus: date 
1546. Paracelsus had been dead five years, and Cornelius 
Fic. 14.—Allegorical representation of transmutation. 
Agrippa, twelve years; Dr. Dee and Oswald Crollius were 
flourishing ; Van Helmont and a host of known alchemists were 
unborn. Our little volume, full of quaint musings of a bygone 
age, has outlived them all, and yet it never drank of the 
elixir vite, although it pretended to‘teach others how to make 
it, and the philosopher’s stone into the bargain. Pretiosa 
Margarita Novella de Thesauro, ac pretiosissima Philosophorum 
Lapide is the title; published with the sanction of Paul 
III. Pontifex Maximus, whose successor, be it remembered, 
established the Zudex Expurgatorius, and might possibly have 
prohibited the Precious Pearl of alchemy. The title-page goes 
on to tell us that it contains the methods of the “ divine art,” as 
given by Amaldus de Villa Nova, Raymond Lulli, Albertus 
Magnus, Michael Scotus, and others, now first collected together 
by Janus Lacinius. The vellum cover is well thumbed, and in 
one place worn through, perhaps by contact with a hot iron on 
an alchemist’s furnace-table, or by much use. There are no MS. 
notes, but on the title-page is the autograph of Sir C. Koby, 
or Hoby, and a favourite maxim, the first word of which alone— 
Fato—is legible. The date of the writing is perhaps 1580-90. 
Some initial letters of the text have been plainly illuminated in 
Fic. 15.—Allegorical representation of transmutation. 
red, by a loving hand; they were copied from a bible printed 
at Lyons in 1326. i 
As to the contents we have firstly an opening address by 
Janus Lacinius, then certain definitions of form, matter, element, 
colour, &c. Next, symbolic representations of the generation of 
the metals, and after this a woodcut representing the transmuta- 
