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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XVIII. No 447 



by linking' himself with the powers of nature and clothing 

 himself with their immeasurable might, but by subduing 

 these forces and compelling' them to surrender their secrets 

 and do his bidding. By torture nature could be taught to 

 obey, and become the slave of her mortal child, and the cruci- 

 ble became the instrument and symbol of this power. 



If the hope of such mastery and of victory laden with so 

 rich spoils were held out to the children of the nineteenth 

 century would they exhibit a superiority to the visionaries of 

 the thirteenth century ? It was the gambling spirit of the 

 olden time, and man sought to use loaded dice in his game 

 with nature. 



Consider, also, how slowly the dreams of alchemy have 

 given place to the wide-awake facts of cheraistrj^ The great 

 Napoleon, during his campaign in Egypt, sought initiation 

 into the dark mysteries of Egyptian secret art. Napoleon 

 III., before he ascended the French throne, had in his service 

 those who attempted the transmutation of baser metals into 

 gold. Dumas thought gold might be an allotropic form of 

 copper, and silver allotropic lead ; and Sir Humphrey Davy 

 told the elder D'Israeli that he did not consider the undiscov- 

 ered art of transmutation an impossible thing. 



About three years ago, in a neighboring city, an alchemist 

 exhibited to a leading business man his ability to multiply 

 gold by heating a gold coin with the philosopher's stone in a 

 crucible, and removing from the crucible a mass of gold 

 weighing three times as much as the original coin. Other 

 business men witnessed a similar operation, and became so 

 fully convinced of his power to increase the amount of gold 

 threefold that they formed a company to multiply gold by 

 digestion with the philosopher's stone. Gold coin to the 

 amount of ninety thousand dollai's was placed in an iron 

 digestion vat with a quantity of the philosopher's stone. The 

 vat was placed over a fire in a furnace built for the purpose, 

 an iron lid placed over the vat, and securely locked, the fur- 

 nace-room locked, and all the keys placed in the hands of 

 the gold-multiplying company (unlimited), with strict orders 

 .that the vat must not be opened under three weeks. The 

 .alchemist having been called away on business to another 

 ■city, and not returning at the appointed time, the gold com- 

 pany became suspicious and opened the vat, only to find the 

 ,gold gone, and some stones and scrap iron in its place. It 

 was the gold that had been transmuted. 



A few months ago the same sharper was arrested in Lon- 

 don for attempting a similar fraud, and when arraigned in 

 the criminal court the police magistrate said " it was just 

 possible that Pinter might have discovered some method of 

 .increasing the weight of gold." Among the victims of Pin- 

 ter's philosopher's stone, a member of the house of Roths- 

 child's and of Baring Brothers are mentioned. Who shall 

 : say that faith in " the great work '" has left the earth ? A 

 .iew days ago at the Old Bailey he was sent to prison for 

 •swindling. 



The ancients, arguing from analogy, supposed that metals 

 •grew like vegetables, only the growth was subterranean ; and 

 there was a vain search for the seeds of metals. Foiled in 

 'Ibis quest, they thought that metals passed upward by suc- 

 cessive development by a sort of evolution, the base metals 

 being progressively changed to those of a higher order till 

 perfect metal such as gold was formed. A third conception 

 was that metals are composite, made up of some basic matter 

 or earth, and phlogiston. The notion of the composite char- 

 acter of a metal was perhaps the most damaging error of the 

 alchemists. With them a metal was not a simple body, but 

 the union of an earth with an inflammable matter; that the 



metalline character resided in the phlogiston rather than in 

 the earth ; that the greater the quantity of phlogiston com- 

 bined with the earth the more perfect was the metalline char- 

 acter brought out. and if we could combine enough phlogis- 

 ton with any earthy body we could form metals even of the 

 most perfect character. Even Macquer, in his dictionary of 

 chemistry (1776), is in doubt whether the kind of earth deter- 

 mines the character of the metal to be formed by adding 

 phlogiston, and whether the real difficulty did not lie in 

 securing sufficient phlogisticatiou of intractable earths. 



The perfect metal, gold, was considered to have an oily or 

 unctuous quality, and the fact that oils contained a large 

 amount of phlogiston was considered significant. To secure 

 the oily quality of a perfect metal, oils were favorite sources 

 of phlogiston; and it was claimed that if intractable earths 

 were fused with oil in an accurately closed vessel, perfect 

 metals could be secured. Nor was this mere theory. Beccher 

 proposed to the States General to procure gold from any 

 kind of sand, and claimed to demonstrate the same by his 

 famous experiment of Minera arenaria perpetiia, building 

 his house on the sand very literally. So Beccher and Geofifroy 

 proposed to obtain iron from all clays by heating them with 

 linseed oil in close vessels. 



The alchemists reasoned that if phlogiston were accepted 

 as the metalliferous principle, the combination of which with 

 any earth would convert it into a metal, and the escape of 

 which would reduce any metal to an earth, then the trans- 

 mutation of one metal into another metal would seem no more 

 difficult than the transformation of earths into metals. 



The phlogistic theory of Beccher and Stahl was considered 

 a great advance in its day because it enabled the chemist to 

 classify all the then known facts of chemistry. But it soon 

 became a bar to scientific progress, and with its overthrow 

 a new era dawned in science. 



The change of a metal into another metal was not a mere 

 theory with the alchemists, they saw repeated proofs of this 

 transmutation. Ey the purifying influence of fire they made 

 purest silyer out of unquestionable lead, and the silver medals 

 attesting this fact which Dr. Bolton lately found in Austria 

 were the ecce signum of the alchemists. The Chinese still 

 hold that lead kept in fusion for two hundred years becomes 

 silver, and silver similarly treated changes to gold. What 

 the alchemists required was some means to quickly transmute 

 the whole of the lead into silver and prevent the large loss of 

 lead when fire alone was used. The truth wrongly interpreted 

 only led them widely astray. 



The conception also of the instability of the properties of 

 matter — that, for example, color, lustre, weight, malleability, 

 fixedness in the fire, etc., are properties that may be imparted 

 to a body destitute of them, irrespective of the nature of such 

 body, just as a man may change his clothes without chang- 

 ing his person — was most misleading for the alchemists. 

 " If the property is separate from the substance, like our ap- 

 parel, let us clothe copper with the properties of gold and 

 thus make it gold." The theory of the instability of matter 

 was the quicksand that swallowed up scientific progress for 

 the alchemists. 



The indestructibility of matter, and the possibility of re- 

 covering a given substance notwithstanding all its disguises 

 by combination with other bodies, — the persistence of matter 

 and the immanence of its properties, — were grand discoveries 

 in material science. They marked the transition fi-om al- 

 chemy to chemistry. The recognition of the indestructibility 

 of force was the second great step, the crowning discovery 

 of modern physics. In the words of Faraday, " It is the 



