ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 11 



w^s not so much the making of gold, as the advancement of 

 medicine in the service of man ; that the operations that go on in 

 the human body are chemical functions. Like the ancient that 

 he was, he personified energy and attributed good digestion to the 

 action of the good genius Archseus who rendered the nutriment 

 consumed assimilable, and separated the indigestible and excretory 

 products. Disease was to be cured by medicines ; and these in 

 turn were to be provided by the sacred science of chemistry, 

 tirio-TrifjLr) cepd. Numbers, letters, the signs of the zodiac, animals, 

 plants and organic substances form the symbolic notation of the 

 time, and many of these there are in the vocabulary of the modern 

 science of to-day, and not only of science, but our common 

 language contains words of every day use ; witness the word 

 'gibberish,' derived from the proper name Geber; and 'bombast,' 

 from Paracelsus, who rejoiced in the name of Phillipus Aureolus 

 Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus. The acidulous critic will, 

 I trust, exonerate me from both bombast and gibberish taken in 

 their modern significance. 



Two other words of interest to the modern chemist, have come 

 down to us from the alchemists, one, the familiar bain marie, used 

 by the French for their water bath ; the term being derived from 

 the Jewess Mary, contemporary with Democritus ; and the other, 

 the seal of Hermes. The ancients personified most things, and as 

 Hermes was held high in reverence as the patron-father of the 

 'black art,' its devotees were spoken of as the Hermetic Philoso- 

 phers : one of the methods of the art being that of enclosing their 

 gold solutions in glass, out of contact with the air, hence to her- 

 metically seal a vessel, is both an operation and a phrase in use 

 to this day. But the summum bonum of the ancient alchemist, 



was the search for — 



"that stone which 

 Philosophers in vain so long havf> sought. 

 In vain, though by their powerful art they bind 

 Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound 

 In various shapes old Proteus from the sea, 

 Drained through a limbec to his native form. 

 What wonder then if fields and regions here 



