114) DR. R. ANGUS SMITH ON THE 



goddess with the san's disk had a son Imhotep (in Greek 

 Imuthes), the ^sculapius of the Egyptian mythology: this 

 again connects with the sun and with medicine^ a branch of 

 chemistry. Here nothing appears to me to be forced, but 

 all comes in naturally. All the chemical allusions to 

 "Imuth" may be seen in Kopp^s work (Beitrage, &c.) 

 alluded to. I do not here attempt to collect the 

 remains of chemical history at any point, but to lead up 

 to the view which I wish to illustrate. 



We see, then, that the word Khem has no trifling 

 meaning, but relates to the principle in nature which, 

 even now, in the latest of times, we look on as the great 

 promotor of all life both on the earth and beyond it. It 

 goes directly to the sun and coincides with our own ideas 

 on the subject. It goes also to mental emotion and to 

 violence, as we saw in the rage of the serpent. It includes 

 internal action, but excludes the glory of the sun, which is 

 represented by the sun-god Ra, translated by the Greeks 

 into Apollo. Still the qualities are mixed. The floating 

 island Chemmis had a temple on it dedicated to Apollo, 

 according to Herodotus. Had he mistaken the heat-god 

 of the chemists and the farmers for the god of light, the 

 glorious Apollo? The difficulty of separating the two is 

 probably the real cause of the mixture of qustlities in Chem. 



Thus far it seems natural that '^chemistry'' should come 

 from Khemi, and from the town Chemmis in Khemi, 

 the spot where the god Khem ruled, and that the earliest 

 of chemical writers, or, at least, one of them, and the best- 

 known of the earliest, should have come out of Chemmis, 

 and the name of the art or science (as it may, to some 

 extent, be considered) should have been preserved as 

 " chemia.'^ It seems so far to have been connected with 

 metals, distillation, dyeing, and medicine even in the 

 earliest ages. 



