Alchemy was, we may say, the sickly but imaginative infancy through which modern chemistry had to pass before it attained its majority, or, in other words, became a positive science. The search for gold was only one crisis in this infancy. This crisis is over, and alchemy is now a thing of the past. There is no longer any need to exhort adventurous spirits, who hope to find Golconda at the bottom of their crucibles, to leave such visions and turn to the safer paths of science or industry. The battle has been fought and won, the problem of the unity of chemical elements or simple bodies belongs rather to the province of metaphysics than to that of experimental science. If here and there an honest student of the black art still survives, he is regarded as a mad but harmless enthusiast; and as for the pretended searchers for the philosopher’s stone, they are, if possible, less interesting objects than the dupes they still continue to cheat. Thus the full time is come for applying to the occult sciences the same searching analysis to which the other myths of prehistoric times have been so rigorously subjected. To trace its earliest beginnings, to investigate its development by the aid of modern criticism, is the province of physical science, no less than of the sister science of morals. Nay, more, we shall find that both had a common origin. Those ancient cosmogonies, those poetical systems which the genius of each nation and race has struck out to solve the problem of the universe and of the destiny of mankind, were the germs of science no less than of literature, of philosophy as well as of religion. And as in the infancy of science its various branches were confused and confounded, so in a like stage of society we often find the same person uniting the parts of philosopher, savant, and priest. Besides this, it is evident that in the absence of all scientific apparatus or instruments, the ancients, if they had limited themselves to the exercise of their reason, must have remained observers and nothing more. It is true they did observe, and that widely and well; but observation alone, even when aided by the strongest and subtlest reason, can lead to nothing but contradictory theories, irreconcilable, because they cannot be verified. And it is not in human nature to remain a simple spectator. Curiosity was first excited by fancy (and the fancy of primitive man, we must remember, was far more active and vigorous than ours), and when it found itself baffled by a natural reaction, it had recourse to divination.

In a word, the ambition of these earliest philosophers was more intense, because its sphere was narrower. In the first stages of civilisation the magician was the man of science. The mysteries of this magic art being inseparable from those of religion and philosophy, were preserved, as it were, hermetically sealed in the adyta of the temple. Its philosophy was the cabala. We must consequently look on the various cabalas or oral traditions, transmitted from age to age as the oracles of various faiths and creeds, as constituting the elements of that theory which the Jewish cabala promulgated some centuries later in a condensed and mutilated form. Astrology and magic were the efforts made in various ways to verify and apply this theory; magic, indeed, or rather magical power, was at starting purely cosmogonic, i.e., regarded as an attribute of God or nature, before it was counterfeited by the magicians of various countries. But, as St Simon has well observed, chemical phenomena are much more complicated than astronomical—the latter requiring only observation, the former experiment—and hence astrology preceded alchemy. But there was then no hard and fast line between the several branches of science, and hence the most opposite were united, not, as now, by a common philosophical or philanthropical object, but by reason of their common theological origin. Thus alchemy was the daughter of astrology, and it was not till the end of the 16th century a.d. that she passed from a state of tutelage. Just in the same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for, as was natural, before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected beforehand that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy.

As in the middle ages invention busied itself with instruments of torture, and as in our days it is taken up almost as much with the destructive engines of war as with the productive arts of peace, so in those early ages it applied itself to the fabrication of idols, to the mechanism and theatrical contrivances for mysteries and religious ceremonies. There was then no desire to communicate discoveries; science was a sort of freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one another as they were of all other classes of society. If we wish to form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilisation, an age which represents at once the naïveté of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic plying the loom, extracting the Tyrian dye, practising chemistry, though ignorant of its very name, despised and oppressed, and only tolerated when he furnished Religion with her trappings or War with aims. Thus the growth of chemistry was slow, and by reason of its backwardness it was longer than any other art in ridding itself of the leading-strings of magic and astrology. Practical discoveries must have been made many times without science acquiring thereby any new fact. For to prevent a new discovery from being lost there must be such a combination of favourable circumstances as was rare in that age and for many succeeding ages. There must be publicity, and publicity is of quite recent growth; the application of the discovery must be not only possible but obvious, as satisfying some want. But wants are only felt as civilisation progresses. Nor is this all; for a practical discovery to become a scientific fact, it must serve to demonstrate the error of one hypothesis, and to suggest a new one, better fitted for the synthesis of existing facts. But old beliefs are proverbially obstinate and virulent in their opposition to newer and truer theories which are destined to eject and replace them. To sum up, even in our own day chemistry rests on a less sound basis than either physics, which had the advantage of originating as late as the 17th century, or astronomy, which dates from the time when the Chaldean shepherd had sufficiently provided for his daily wants to find leisure for gazing into the starry heavens.

After this general introduction we may now proceed to consider the subject in detail under the following heads :— First, we will cast a rapid glance at certain cosmologies and philosophical systems, in order to bring prominently before the reader those points which throw light on chemical theories. Secondly, we will consider alchemy at the moment when it ceased to be purely religious and began an independent existence; that is to say, during the 3d and 4th centuries A.D., and in that city which was the battlefield on which the various philosophical and religious creeds of the East met. In the fierce struggles which ensued, in the strange alliances which they there made, we shall find them, by their mutual recriminations, involuntarily revealing to us their hidden secrets. As the darkness of the middle ages approaches, we shall follow our science in its journey to Arabia; from Arabia we shall trace it back to Europe, and hear it taught with stammering lips and feeble tongue by subtile or solemn doctors. We shall attempt to analyse its ambitious aspirations and its barren performances. During the Renaissance we shall see it at its zenith, inspired by a mad enthusiasm which was near akin to genius, an enthusiasm which gave birth to medicine and modern chemistry. Lastly, in the 17th and 18th centuries we shall see it degenerate into pure charlatanism. In conclusion, we shall attempt to recover the few grains of pure ore which may be extracted from its broken alembics.

I. Cosmogonies and Philosophies.

In India, as is well known, the contempt in which the caste of artizans was held was still farther increased by the tendency of religion to consider birth and life, and the actions and desires which are part and parcel of man’s life, as an unmixed evil Consequently, outside the workshop, practical chemistry can have made but little progress. Nevertheless, among the priests of India, as in later times in Europe, we find the ordeal of fire and of serpents commonly practised. It follows that the Brahmins must have possessed some chemical secrets to enable them to kill or save those they thought guilty or innocent. These secrets, too, must from time to time have been divulged by indiscretion or perfidy, and spread beyond the temple; for we read of accused persone escaping unharmed from the ordeal, even when their accuser was a Brahmin. But the Mussulman traveller of the 9th century, who has preserved this curious detail, allows that the trial was in his day becoming more elaborate and complicated, and that it was next to impossible for an accused person to escape. However this may be, it is certain that the meditative genius which distinguishes the race had, even before they conquered the yellow and black races, led these first speculators to certain conceptions which have an important bearing on the present subject. Some had conceived ether as composed of distinct atoms, others imagined an ether decomposing itself into atoms by the free play of its own forces. These two theories, the one dualistic, the other Unitarian, strangely foreshadow the discoveries of modern dynamics. We find the speculators of another race indulging the singular fancy that they could observe in atoms what we may call oscultations of the play of forces. This, at any rate, is the most natural explanation of the term nodes by which the Phoenicians designated atoms. The Persians, who considered the first tree and the first bull as the two ancestors of man, discovered in physics generally two antagonistic principles, one male and one female, primordial fire and primordial water, corresponding to the good and bad principles of their religion. Over all creatures and all things there were presiding genii, Tzeds or Feroners. They had already formulated the parallelism between the Sephiroth, the empyrean, the primum mobile, the firmament, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Mercury, Moon, and the parts of the body, the brain, lungs, heart, &c. In this correspondence between the heavenly bodies and the human frame which the ancient Persians laid down, and the Hindu belief in the peregrination of sinful souls through the animal, vegetable, and even the mineral world, till, by these pilgrimages, they at last won absorption into the Deity, or Moncti, we have, in their original form, the two fundamental beliefs of alchemy.

The Greeks, unrivalled as they were in poetry, art, and ethics, made little way in occult philosophy. The Greek intellect, precise and anthropomorphic, with no leaning to transcendentalism, was a protest against the boldness of oriental metaphysics. Thus they contented themselves with inventing a strange gamut of deities corresponding to different types of men. This gamut—Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Mars, and Venus—was afterwards completed in the cabala by the addition of the moon, typifying the phlegmatic character of northern races, and forms a connecting link between astrology and alchemy, by establishing a double correspondence between planets of the same name and metals. The whole was systematised in the works of Paracelsus and Böhme, and called the theory of signatures. Whether the Greek philosophers taught that the principle of all things was water, like Thales, or air, like Anaximander, or air and water, as Xenophanes, or the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, as the school of Hippocrates, the tendency of Greek speculation was to establish those profound distinctions which resulted later in the theory of the four elements, the four humours, &c., which the disciples of Aristotle held. Hippocrates, for example, thought that if man was composed of a single element, he would never be ill; but as he is composed of many elements, complex remedies are required. Thus Hippocrates may be called an anti-alchemist; and though the theory of the four elements reigned supreme throughout the middle ages, it easily lent itself to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the universal panacea, because the oriental idea of the transmutation of elements, from the time when the various systems of the East were syncretised at Alexandria and received their final development in Arabia in the writings of Geber Rhasis and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), was a universal article of belief. But even in the palmiest days of Greek anthropomorphism there was a gradual infiltration of Asiatic ideas, partly through the mysteries of Eleusis, partly through the doctrines of certain philosophers, who were by nature susceptive of barbaric influences. For, besides Greece proper, there was a second Greece in Asia Minor and a third in Italy, not to mention the Pelasgic tribes who adhered tenaciously to the primitive ideas of the race.

Among the Greek philosophers, then, who appreciably influenced physics, chemistry, and physiology (the three sciences were then one), we may notice in particular—1. Heraclitus of Ephesus, sur-named the “Obscure.” Maintaining that fire alone was the principle of all things, he regarded generation as an ascending road, i.e., a volatilisation; and decomposition as a descending road, i.e., a fixation. Here we have the first idea of Jacob’s ladder or "Homer’s Chain” of the alchemists. 2. Empedocles, who is indeed the first who mentions the four elements; but he subordinates them as complex products to his primordial indestructible atoms, which were animated by love and hatred. 3. Democritus, who, investing these atoms with a movement of their own, proceeds to construct the universe by shocks and harmonies of shocks or vortices. 4. Anaxagoras, who saw “the all-in-all” (Aristotle, Met. 4, 5), the infinitely great universe in the infinitely small atom, and ingeniously applied the principle of analogy to unravel the tangled skein of ancient science. 5. Aristotle, who added to the four elements a fifth, ether, eternal and unchangeable, itself the primum mobile (Arist., De C oe lo, 1, 2). In the 4th century a.d., Nemesius, bishop of Emesa (the modern Homs, on the east bank of the Orontes), is one of the most distinguished representatives of Alexandrian syncretism. A single quotation will suffice to show that the idea of the transmutation of metals, from the time when Platonism, magic, and neo-Christianity were combined in a species of eclectic mysticism, was regarded as an article of orthodox belief :—“To prevent the destruction of elements, or things which are compounded of elements, the Creator has wisely ordained that elements should be capable of transmutation one into the other, or into their component parts, or that their component parts should be resolved again into their original elements. Thus the perpetuity of things is secured by the continual succession of these reciprocal generations.” This statement of the pious bishop is all the more weighty, inasmuch as the author of The Nature of Man was only treating of psychology and physiology. The study of gnosticism would carry us too far; and one more quotation from this work, which has long fallen into unmerited oblivion, will prove to what an extent the most scientific theories of this day were tinged and vitiated by mysticism:—“Porphyry, in his treatise on sensation, tells us that vision is produced neither by a cone nor an image, nor any other object, but that the mind, being placed en rapport with visible objects, only sees itself in these objects, which are nothing else than itself, seeing that the mind embraces everything, and that all that exists is nothing but the mind, which contains bodies of all kinds.” Another step, and we are landed in realism. It is not surprising, then, to find that the alchemists, while working in the laboratory, aspired at the. same time to find the moral quintessence and verify the doctrines of revealed religion. For mysticism in theory is nothing but a reaction against the positivism of reason and science: the mystic, dissatisfied with these, seeks in nature a reflection of his inner feelings. And in practice mysticism rests on confusions or exaggerations, like those of Porphyry, or some such dictum as the one which Nemesius quotes with the following uncritical comment :—“Now, since Porphyry asserts that there is but one reasoning soul for all things, he is right in saying that the soul sees itself in everything.” Such visionaries, though they may to a certain extent have observed, were not likely to experiment. Thus, at Babylon, where similar theories prevailed, the college of philosophers was divided into three classes, the “Hhartumim,” or soothsayers; the “Asa-phim,” who were more agriculturists than zoologists, more zoologists than physicists, more physicists than chemists; the “Mechasphim,” or doctors, who were consulted by the great, as often to rid them of their enemies as to cure their families and dependants; lastly, the “Chasedim” or Chaldeans, properly so called; i.e., the astronomers or astrologers. In this classification of sciences as pursued at Babylon by a peculiar caste, chemistry was little regarded. Science was the monopoly of a privileged class before it became the common property of the human race. A class is sure to cling to a monopoly; an individual is obliged by his feebleness to impart his knowledge to others.

In Egypt the doctrine of the Palingenesis was symbolised by the Scarabaeus, which suggested to St Augustine the following strange comparison:—“Jesus Christus bonus ille scarabaeus meus, non ea tantum de causa quod unigenitus, quod ipsemet sui auctor mortalium speciem induxerit, sed quod in hac faece nostra sese volutant et ex ipsa nasci homo voluerit."

These ideas, which St Augustine borrowed from the religious beliefs of Egypt, were adopted by certain alchemists; and Egypt, which saw in the Scarabaeus “the Father, Man, a world of trial, a ladder whereby fallen souls may rise,” justly claimed to be the birthplace of ancient chemistry, to which it assigned a peculiar rank, calling it the “sacred art.” But although certain Egyptian priests may have spread the report that they owed their enormous fortunes to their knowledge of chemical secrets, this veneration produced but few practical results. It was, however, this report which made the emperors Severus and Diocletian issue an edict that all their magical books should be burned.

II. The Sacred Art.

Paganism, at the time when it was engaged in its last struggle with Christianity, had long ceased to be exclusively Greek or Roman. It had assimilated Mithratic, Chaldean, and Egyptian mysteries, and even allied itself to a certain extent with the Helleno-Hebraism of the...

Alchemy was, we may say, the sickly but imaginative infancy through which modern chemistry had to pass before it attained its majority, or, in other words, became a positive science. The search for gold was only one crisis in this infancy. This crisis is over, and alchemy is now a thing of the past. There is no longer any need to exhort adventurous spirits, who hope to find Golconda at the bottom of their crucibles, to leave such visions and turn to the safer paths of science or industry. The battle has been fought and won, the problem of the unity of chemical elements or simple bodies belongs rather to the province of metaphysics than to that of experimental science. If here and there an honest student of the black art still survives, he is regarded as a mad but harmless enthusiast; and as for the pretended searchers for the philosopher’s stone, they are, if possible, less interesting objects than the dupes they still continue to cheat. Thus the full time is come for applying to the occult sciences the same searching analysis to which the other myths of prehistoric times have been so rigorously subjected. To trace its earliest beginnings, to investigate its development by the aid of modern criticism, is the province of physical science, no less than of the sister science of morals. Nay, more, we shall find that both had a common origin. Those ancient cosmogonies, those poetical systems which the genius of each nation and race has struck out to solve the problem of the universe and of the destiny of mankind, were the germs of science no less than of literature, of philosophy as well as of religion. And as in the infancy of science its various branches were confused and confounded, so in a like stage of society we often find the same person uniting the parts of philosopher, savant, and priest. Besides this, it is evident that in the absence of all scientific apparatus or instruments, the ancients, if they had limited themselves to the exercise of their reason, must have remained observers and nothing more. It is true they did observe, and that widely and well; but observation alone, even when aided by the strongest and subtlest reason, can lead to nothing but contradictory theories, irreconcilable, because they cannot be verified. And it is not in human nature to remain a simple spectator. Curiosity was first excited by fancy (and the fancy of primitive man, we must remember, was far more active and vigorous than ours), and when it found itself baffled by a natural reaction, it had recourse to divination.

In a word, the ambition of these earliest philosophers was more intense, because its sphere was narrower. In the first stages of civilisation the magician was the man of science. The mysteries of this magic art being inseparable from those of religion and philosophy, were preserved, as it were, hermetically sealed in the adyta of the temple. Its philosophy was the cabala. We must consequently look on the various cabalas or oral traditions, transmitted from age to age as the oracles of various faiths and creeds, as constituting the elements of that theory which the Jewish cabala promulgated some centuries later in a condensed and mutilated form. Astrology and magic were the efforts made in various ways to verify and apply this theory; magic, indeed, or rather magical power, was at starting purely cosmogonic, i.e., regarded as an attribute of God or nature, before it was counterfeited by the magicians of various countries. But, as St Simon has well observed, chemical phenomena are much more complicated than astronomical—the latter requiring only observation, the former experiment—and hence astrology preceded alchemy. But there was then no hard and fast line between the several branches of science, and hence the most opposite were united, not, as now, by a common philosophical or philanthropical object, but by reason of their common theological origin. Thus alchemy was the daughter of astrology, and it was not till the end of the 16th century a.d. that she passed from a state of tutelage. Just in the same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for, as was natural, before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected beforehand that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy.

As in the middle ages invention busied itself with instruments of torture, and as in our days it is taken up almost as much with the destructive engines of war as with the productive arts of peace, so in those early ages it applied itself to the fabrication of idols, to the mechanism and theatrical contrivances for mysteries and religious ceremonies. There was then no desire to communicate discoveries; science was a sort of freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one another as they were of all other classes of society. If we wish to form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilisation, an age which represents at once the naïveté of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic plying the loom, extracting the Tyrian dye, practising chemistry, though ignorant of its very name, despised and oppressed, and only tolerated when he furnished Religion with her trappings or War with aims. Thus the growth of chemistry was slow, and by reason of its backwardness it was longer than any other art in ridding itself of the leading-strings of magic and astrology. Practical discoveries must have been made many times without science acquiring thereby any new fact. For to prevent a new discovery from being lost there must be such a combination of favourable circumstances as was rare in that age and for many succeeding ages. There must be publicity, and publicity is of quite recent growth; the application of the discovery must be not only possible but obvious, as satisfying some want. But wants are only felt as civilisation progresses. Nor is this all; for a practical discovery to become a scientific fact, it must serve to demonstrate the error of one hypothesis, and to suggest a new one, better fitted for the synthesis of existing facts. But old beliefs are proverbially obstinate and virulent in their opposition to newer and truer theories which are destined to eject and replace them. To sum up, even in our own day chemistry rests on a less sound basis than either physics, which had the advantage of originating as late as the 17th century, or astronomy, which dates from the time when the Chaldean shepherd had sufficiently provided for his daily wants to find leisure for gazing into the starry heavens.

After this general introduction we may now proceed to consider the subject in detail under the following heads :— First, we will cast a rapid glance at certain cosmologies and philosophical systems, in order to bring prominently before the reader those points which throw light on chemical theories. Secondly, we will consider alchemy at the moment when it ceased to be purely religious and began an independent existence; that is to say, during the 3d and 4th centuries A.D., and in that city which was the battlefield on which the various philosophical and religious creeds of the East met. In the fierce struggles which ensued, in the strange alliances which they there made, we shall find them, by their mutual recriminations, involuntarily revealing to us their hidden secrets. As the darkness of the middle ages approaches, we shall follow our science in its journey to Arabia; from Arabia we shall trace it back to Europe, and hear it taught with stammering lips and feeble tongue by subtile or solemn doctors. We shall attempt to analyse its ambitious aspirations and its barren performances. During the Renaissance we shall see it at its zenith, inspired by a mad enthusiasm which was near akin to genius, an enthusiasm which gave birth to medicine and modern chemistry. Lastly, in the 17th and 18th centuries we shall see it degenerate into pure charlatanism. In conclusion, we shall attempt to recover the few grains of pure ore which may be extracted from its broken alembics.

I. Cosmogonies and Philosophies.

In India, as is well known, the contempt in which the caste of artizans was held was still farther increased by the tendency of religion to consider birth and life, and the actions and desires which are part and parcel of man’s life, as an unmixed evil Consequently, outside the workshop, practical chemistry can have made but little progress. Nevertheless, among the priests of India, as in later times in Europe, we find the ordeal of fire and of serpents commonly practised. It follows that the Brahmins must have possessed some chemical secrets to enable them to kill or save those they thought guilty or innocent. These secrets, too, must from time to time have been divulged by indiscretion or perfidy, and spread beyond the temple; for we read of accused persone escaping unharmed from the ordeal, even when their accuser was a Brahmin. But the Mussulman traveller of the 9th century, who has preserved this curious detail, allows that the trial was in his day becoming more elaborate and complicated, and that it was next to impossible for an accused person to escape. However this may be, it is certain that the meditative genius which distinguishes the race had, even before they conquered the yellow and black races, led these first speculators to certain conceptions which have an important bearing on the present subject. Some had conceived ether as composed of distinct atoms, others imagined an ether decomposing itself into atoms by the free play of its own forces. These two theories, the one dualistic, the other Unitarian, strangely foreshadow the discoveries of modern dynamics. We find the speculators of another race indulging the singular fancy that they could observe in atoms what we may call oscultations of the play of forces. This, at any rate, is the most natural explanation of the term nodes by which the Phoenicians designated atoms. The Persians, who considered the first tree and the first bull as the two ancestors of man, discovered in physics generally two antagonistic principles, one male and one female, primordial fire and primordial water, corresponding to the good and bad principles of their religion. Over all creatures and all things there were presiding genii, Tzeds or Feroners. They had already formulated the parallelism between the Sephiroth, the empyrean, the primum mobile, the firmament, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Mercury, Moon, and the parts of the body, the brain, lungs, heart, &c. In this correspondence between the heavenly bodies and the human frame which the ancient Persians laid down, and the Hindu belief in the peregrination of sinful souls through the animal, vegetable, and even the mineral world, till, by these pilgrimages, they at last won absorption into the Deity, or Moncti, we have, in their original form, the two fundamental beliefs of alchemy.

The Greeks, unrivalled as they were in poetry, art, and ethics, made little way in occult philosophy. The Greek intellect, precise and anthropomorphic, with no leaning to transcendentalism, was a protest against the boldness of oriental metaphysics. Thus they contented themselves with inventing a strange gamut of deities corresponding to different types of men. This gamut—Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, Mercury, Mars, and Venus—was afterwards completed in the cabala by the addition of the moon, typifying the phlegmatic character of northern races, and forms a connecting link between astrology and alchemy, by establishing a double correspondence between planets of the same name and metals. The whole was systematised in the works of Paracelsus and Böhme, and called the theory of signatures. Whether the Greek philosophers taught that the principle of all things was water, like Thales, or air, like Anaximander, or air and water, as Xenophanes, or the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, as the school of Hippocrates, the tendency of Greek speculation was to establish those profound distinctions which resulted later in the theory of the four elements, the four humours, &c., which the disciples of Aristotle held. Hippocrates, for example, thought that if man was composed of a single element, he would never be ill; but as he is composed of many elements, complex remedies are required. Thus Hippocrates may be called an anti-alchemist; and though the theory of the four elements reigned supreme throughout the middle ages, it easily lent itself to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the universal panacea, because the oriental idea of the transmutation of elements, from the time when the various systems of the East were syncretised at Alexandria and received their final development in Arabia in the writings of Geber Rhasis and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), was a universal article of belief. But even in the palmiest days of Greek anthropomorphism there was a gradual infiltration of Asiatic ideas, partly through the mysteries of Eleusis, partly through the doctrines of certain philosophers, who were by nature susceptive of barbaric influences. For, besides Greece proper, there was a second Greece in Asia Minor and a third in Italy, not to mention the Pelasgic tribes who adhered tenaciously to the primitive ideas of the race.

Among the Greek philosophers, then, who appreciably influenced physics, chemistry, and physiology (the three sciences were then one), we may notice in particular—1. Heraclitus of Ephesus, sur-named the “Obscure.” Maintaining that fire alone was the principle of all things, he regarded generation as an ascending road, i.e., a volatilisation; and decomposition as a descending road, i.e., a fixation. Here we have the first idea of Jacob’s ladder or "Homer’s Chain” of the alchemists. 2. Empedocles, who is indeed the first who mentions the four elements; but he subordinates them as complex products to his primordial indestructible atoms, which were animated by love and hatred. 3. Democritus, who, investing these atoms with a movement of their own, proceeds to construct the universe by shocks and harmonies of shocks or vortices. 4. Anaxagoras, who saw “the all-in-all” (Aristotle, Met. 4, 5), the infinitely great universe in the infinitely small atom, and ingeniously applied the principle of analogy to unravel the tangled skein of ancient science. 5. Aristotle, who added to the four elements a fifth, ether, eternal and unchangeable, itself the primum mobile (Arist., De C oe lo, 1, 2). In the 4th century a.d., Nemesius, bishop of Emesa (the modern Homs, on the east bank of the Orontes), is one of the most distinguished representatives of Alexandrian syncretism. A single quotation will suffice to show that the idea of the transmutation of metals, from the time when Platonism, magic, and neo-Christianity were combined in a species of eclectic mysticism, was regarded as an article of orthodox belief :—“To prevent the destruction of elements, or things which are compounded of elements, the Creator has wisely ordained that elements should be capable of transmutation one into the other, or into their component parts, or that their component parts should be resolved again into their original elements. Thus the perpetuity of things is secured by the continual succession of these reciprocal generations.” This statement of the pious bishop is all the more weighty, inasmuch as the author of The Nature of Man was only treating of psychology and physiology. The study of gnosticism would carry us too far; and one more quotation from this work, which has long fallen into unmerited oblivion, will prove to what an extent the most scientific theories of this day were tinged and vitiated by mysticism:—“Porphyry, in his treatise on sensation, tells us that vision is produced neither by a cone nor an image, nor any other object, but that the mind, being placed en rapport with visible objects, only sees itself in these objects, which are nothing else than itself, seeing that the mind embraces everything, and that all that exists is nothing but the mind, which contains bodies of all kinds.” Another step, and we are landed in realism. It is not surprising, then, to find that the alchemists, while working in the laboratory, aspired at the. same time to find the moral quintessence and verify the doctrines of revealed religion. For mysticism in theory is nothing but a reaction against the positivism of reason and science: the mystic, dissatisfied with these, seeks in nature a reflection of his inner feelings. And in practice mysticism rests on confusions or exaggerations, like those of Porphyry, or some such dictum as the one which Nemesius quotes with the following uncritical comment :—“Now, since Porphyry asserts that there is but one reasoning soul for all things, he is right in saying that the soul sees itself in everything.” Such visionaries, though they may to a certain extent have observed, were not likely to experiment. Thus, at Babylon, where similar theories prevailed, the college of philosophers was divided into three classes, the “Hhartumim,” or soothsayers; the “Asa-phim,” who were more agriculturists than zoologists, more zoologists than physicists, more physicists than chemists; the “Mechasphim,” or doctors, who were consulted by the great, as often to rid them of their enemies as to cure their families and dependants; lastly, the “Chasedim” or Chaldeans, properly so called; i.e., the astronomers or astrologers. In this classification of sciences as pursued at Babylon by a peculiar caste, chemistry was little regarded. Science was the monopoly of a privileged class before it became the common property of the human race. A class is sure to cling to a monopoly; an individual is obliged by his feebleness to impart his knowledge to others.

In Egypt the doctrine of the Palingenesis was symbolised by the Scarabaeus, which suggested to St Augustine the following strange comparison:—“Jesus Christus bonus ille scarabaeus meus, non ea tantum de causa quod unigenitus, quod ipsemet sui auctor mortalium speciem induxerit, sed quod in hac faece nostra sese volutant et ex ipsa nasci homo voluerit."

These ideas, which St Augustine borrowed from the religious beliefs of Egypt, were adopted by certain alchemists; and Egypt, which saw in the Scarabaeus “the Father, Man, a world of trial, a ladder whereby fallen souls may rise,” justly claimed to be the birthplace of ancient chemistry, to which it assigned a peculiar rank, calling it the “sacred art.” But although certain Egyptian priests may have spread the report that they owed their enormous fortunes to their knowledge of chemical secrets, this veneration produced but few practical results. It was, however, this report which made the emperors Severus and Diocletian issue an edict that all their magical books should be burned.

II. The Sacred Art.

Paganism, at the time when it was engaged in its last struggle with Christianity, had long ceased to be exclusively Greek or Roman. It had assimilated Mithratic, Chaldean, and Egyptian mysteries, and even allied itself to a certain extent with the Helleno-Hebraism of the...