August 12, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



175 



sonally remembered so great a liealer. Be- 

 sides, how should his name have been 

 missing from the Benedictine rolls ? The 

 facts must in some way have been mistaken 

 by Tolle. Give me leave, then, to oifer a 

 ■conjectural emendation of the story. Let 

 me suppose that, instead of Maximilian, it 

 was the Emperor Matthias who made the 

 investigation, or possibly even Eudolph II. 

 fhe latter was a devoted alchemist ; the 

 former was at least in the way of hearing a 

 good deal about alchemy. If it was Mat- 

 thias, the date might be changed from 1515 

 to 1615, when the Emperor, having just 

 concluded a long truce with the Turks, was 

 enjoying unwonted leisure. If it was Ru- 

 dolph, the search must have taken place 

 not later than 1612. In either case the 

 the recent publication by Tholde would 

 naturally have suggested the inquiry, and 

 the fact that the name was not found is ex- 

 plained in the simplest manner by suppos- 

 ing there had never been such a man as 

 Basil Valentine. 



In the second place, Count Guden, in" his 

 History of Erfurt, is quoted as saying that 

 Basil Valentine lived in 1413 in St. Peter's 

 monastery in that town. But manifestly 

 that could not have been the author of the 

 Triumph- Wag en, with his Franzosen-Sucht. 

 Besides, Kopp assures us that the roll of 

 that monastery bears no such name. 



In the third place, Sprengel, writing in 

 Ersch und Gruber, cites a passage of Guan- 

 erius referring to Basil Valentine. I doubt 

 if the citation has ever been verified. At 

 any rate, since Guanerius died, in 1440, our 

 author cannot have been intended by him. 



Finally, as another difficulty, the ques- 

 tion arises where could Basil Valentine 

 have acquired his ideas, wild as they were, 

 and his skill in chemistry? Paracelsus, the 

 son of an eminent physician, running all 

 over Europe in his thirst for knowledge, 

 and undoubtedly a great man, might very 

 -well have gained such ideas directly or in- 



directly from Arabian sources. But Basil 

 Valentine, though by no means hiding his 

 knowledge under a bushel, nowhere boasts, 

 as far as I know, of any acquaintance with 

 Arabic. 



Thus, the attempt to sustain the hypothe- 

 sis of a real Basil Valentine creates a new 

 diificulty with every new circumstance and 

 feature of the facts that we learn. Let us 

 turn, then, to that hypothesis which ought 

 logically to have been adopted at first, 

 namely, that Tholde was himself the author, 

 and see whether the facts may not fit 

 into that better. Those which we have al- 

 ready had occasion to notice certainly do so. 



But let us ask who was Johann Tholde ? 

 He was a man of means, part proprietor of 

 a chemical industry, the salt works at 

 Franckenhausen, and the secretary for 

 many years of the Eosicrucian Brotherhood, 

 a society founded on literary fraud and 

 saturated with it. 



And how does this secretary of a society 

 of humbug account for his possession of the 

 MSS? Does his tale bear the marks of 

 truth ? The story is well known. The 

 brotherhood pretended that their founder 

 had been buried at the ripe age of 106 in 

 the house of the Holy Spirit at Erfurt, hav- 

 ing directed that his epitaph should read 

 ' Post CXX annos patebo.' Accordingly, 

 that time having elapsed, one of the pillars 

 of the chapter-house burst and disclosed 

 ancient books embodying the doctrines of 

 the brotherhood. We have a list of some 

 of those books, but the only ones of any 

 consequence are the treatises of Basil Val- 

 entine. If you believe the story of the 

 bursting pillar, you will believe these books 

 authentic. If not, you will believe them 

 to be the forgeries of Tholde and his breth- 

 ren, who really stole the ideas of Paracel- 

 sus and in one only of the books inserted 

 some solid chemistry. 



"When we once come to regard the Triumph. 

 Wagen, no longer as antedating Copernicus, 



