DISCOVERY OF ALCOHOL AND DISTILLATION. 93 



good leaden alembic ; put on the cap, and you will distill the 

 burning water. It should be kept in a glass vessel tightly closed." 

 The Munich manuscript adds : " These are the virtue and proper- 

 erties of the inflammable water : A rag moistened with it and 

 set on fire will burn with a great flame. When the fire is extin- 

 guished the cloth will be found unharmed. If you dip your fin- 

 ger in this water and then put fire to it, it will burn like a candle 

 and not suffer any wounding." This was in fact a prestidigitator's 

 trick ; and the part those people played is manifest in the begin- 

 nings of a large number of inventions in antiquity and the middle 

 ages. In any case the facts pointed to in this description are ex- 

 act, and show how first observers are often struck by real or ap- 

 parent properties of bodies, even though they be insignificant. 

 Frequently, too, they complicate operations by superfluous if not 

 annoying details, to which, according to the theories by which 

 they are guided, they attach the same importance as to the rest. 

 For instance, in the first receipt of Marcus Grsecus is a direction 

 to add sulphur previous to the distillation, which occurs likewise 

 in a book by Al Farabi, transcribed into another manuscript of 

 the same period, as well as in Porta's Natural Magic, which was 

 composed in the sixteenth century. It is therefore not accidental. 

 It is the product of a theory which is expounded at length in sev- 

 eral texts, held by the chemists of the time, that the great moist- 

 ure of wine is opposed to its inflammability. To counteract this 

 they added salts or sulphur, the dryness of which, they said, aug- 

 mented the combustible properties. One of these old authors re- 

 fers, in support of his theory, to dry wood and green wood, un- 

 equally combustible, according to the season when they were cut 

 and the proportion of moisture they contain. 



We should recollect also that volatility and combustibility were 

 then confounded and called sulphurity, a term which was still ap- 

 plied in this sense in the time of Stahl, at the beginning of the eight- 

 eenth century. These ideas go back to the Grecian alchemists, 

 who called every volatile liquid and every sublimate sulphurous 

 (or divine) water. In this we can see the origin of those compli- 

 cated preparations, so hard to understand now, which were em- 

 ployed by the old alchemists. They tried to communicate to bod- 

 ies the qualities in which they were lacking by adding to them 

 substances in which those qualities were supposed to be con- 

 centrated. Hence sulphur was added to wine in the belief that it 

 would render the manifestation of its inflammable principle easier. 



The first man of science known by name who spoke of alcohol 

 is Arnaud de Villeneuve, who was of a date posterior to the com- 

 position of these writings. He is commonly spoken of as the 

 author of the discovery, though he never himself presented such 

 a claim. He only spoke of alcohol as a preparation known in his 



