
* 208 NATURE AND LIFE. 
stone is the region in which the seeds of the future are 
slowly germinating. That phantom of the elixir of life is 
the step to a vast number of experimental attempts, from 
which the healing art gains profit in spite of them. In 
the general belief that every thing remains unmoving and 
wrapped in darkness, it will be found that, as early as the 
fifteenth century, the schools of Arabia and Salerno on the 
one hand, and the alchemists on the other, added a mul- 
titude of precious substances to the stores of the materia 
medica, such as several salts of antimony, sal-saturni, liver 
of sulphur, ether, ammonia, red precipitate, nitric, sul- 
phuric, and muriatic acid, alcohol, etc. 
Thus, when Paracelsus drew the attention of Kurope to 
himself at the opening of the sixteenth century, the time 
was favorable to the design of that renowned physician. 
Paracelsus is the chief promoter of chemical therapeutics, 
and has thus exerted very great influence upon the destiny 
of medicine. He first put forward chemistry as the true 
method of preparing medicines, attacked the abuse of the 
complicated and often inert mixtures of Galen’s polyphar- 
macy, and brought to view the need of isolating the quin- 
tessences, the active principles of simples. He restored 
the almost forgotten opium to credit. He preached the. 
use of powerful substances taken from the mineral king- 
dom, and showed the efficacy in medicine of the salts of 
mercury, of iron, arsenic, antimony, tin, gold, etc. His 
fortunate cures were as famous as his irregular life was. 
Paracelsus retained the forms of diction in use among his 
contemporaries, and even carried them to excess. His 
works abound in the mystical phrases of theosophy and 
the cabala, but he was at bottom a man of thoroughly 
emancipated mind, whose boasting may be pardoned in 
recollection of the opposition he met, and whose seeming 
madness we excuse when we remember the correctness of 
his fundamental ideas. 
