III. Those European alchemists also believed in the elixir of life, or

universal medicine, capable of curing aU curable diseases, and of prolonging life long beyond its present average of duration. It was not till the dotage of alchemy that the conception of an elixir of immortality amused the world. In connection with this unattainable ideal of theirs, it has just to be men- tioned that Lord Bacon and Descartes, who are always regarded as the Castor and Pollux of that luminous epoch of science which extinguished the mediaeval schools, were quite as much bent upon the invention of means for the prolongation of life as any alchemist of them aU. We have already seen that the French methodologist actually supposed himself to have added a few hundred years to existence ; and anybody that has read Bacon’s precepts on the subject, will testify that the elixLr-himters could not exceed him either in the largeness of his expectations or in the absurdity of his plans. Neither is it very easy at first sight to perceive the practical superiority of the successive medical schemes of Stahl, Boer- haave, Cullen, Broussais, and the rest of the modern doctrinaries, over those equally successful and more poetical dreamers. If a scientific spec- tator may judge from the recent writings of certain of our own physicians —
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CHAMBERS’S PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.
from the articles and letters, for example, of Dr Forbes, the editor of the ‘ British and Foreign Medical Review,’ of the late Dr Andrew Combe, and of a host of anonymous abettors of these able men, the predominant school of physic appears to be coming to the conclusion, that it can scarcely do better than go back to the time of Hippocrates, sit a while at his feet, and begin afresh. It is the very counsel which poor Paracelsus thundered into the astonished and insulted ears of his contemporaries.
Such, then, was alchemy ; such the heaven, the horizon, and the neigh- bourhood of the third of the ancestors of the modern chemist. To the man of the nineteenth century, it must always be interesting to gi'ope away back into those dim and spectral I'egions of scientific development. Were cir- cumstances favourable, we should be glad to accompany the student into some of the more quaint and questionable of those recesses of the past. We should visit the weak as well as the strong ; for there w'ere the weaker brethren in those religious days of science as well as now. What buried figures we should descry, intent with sweating brains upon the last projec- tion ; what minglings of the glare of the furnace with the unearthly glow of a magnificent, but misdirected spirit of enthusiasm ; wliat perilous balancings of the spirit between the dread extremes of imposture and insanity ; what thin lights and solid shadows we should behold in the murkier hom-s of that merely starlit night of history ; what agonies of mind and heart ! Ideals how sublime, realities how paltry ! It was their lifelong struggle, to bring a lofty but imperfect theory of nature into efiFec- tive unison with the inflexible phenomena of the world of facts. They did not succeed, and they have passed away. Peace be with them ; for alas ! the life of the visionary is the same feverish, uncalculating, unsatis- fying, weary, and maddening discipline in all ages ; and there are as many of those not unlovely maniacs in the epoch of Chancellor Bacon and Humboldt as ever there were in that of Friar Bacon and Paracelsus.
The history of chemistry, subsequently to the apotheosis of the alchemi- cal epoch, was not without its extravagances ; but it became remarkable for the unprecedented rapidity with which the accumulation of facts proceeded. In the hands of the practical chemists, who have already been alluded to as the legitimate successors of the alchemists-proper, the science became more unreservedly directed to the positive labours of the labora- tory ; and there rapidly ensued a very remarkable extension of the boundaries of concrete or practical chemistry. Hence the great multipli- cation of chemical substances, experimental apparatuses, and new processes, that succeeded the euthanasy of alchemy. Stones and rocks, earths and ashes, ores and meteors and lavas of every species, were triturated, lixi- viated, roasted, ignited, dissolved in acids, crystallised, precipitated. It was soon perceived that there is one not only salt, one elemental salt, but an endless variety of salts : oil-of-vitriol salts, aqua-fortis salts, spirit-of- salt salts, eai'thy salts, alkaline salts, metallic salts, and so forth. There were forthwith found to be more metals than seven, the seven planets and holes in the human head notwithstanding. These were discriminated the mineral, the vegetable, and the volatile alkalis. At length a great chemical principle began to dawn in the midst of all these gathering and crowding details, like the gleam of untouched phosphorus in the dark. In short, the 30
ALCHEMY AND THE ALCHEMISTS.
new chemists began to surmise that the chemical act of burning, or the pro- ' cess of combustion, as it is now called, is a process of first-rate importance and significance in the science of chemistry. They descried that the right explanation of the burning of wood, of brimstone, of anything, in fine, that is susceptible of combustion, would reveal a critical secret of this depart- ment of knowledge. It was the distinct perception of this, and the ‘ invention of a hypothesis or theory of combustion, that constituted, or rather consummated, the new movement, and fairly consolidated a new epoch of chemical development. Beecher and Stahl were the patriarchs of this great school — the former as the inventor, the latter as the illustrator of the doctrine of phlogiston ; a doctrine which sufficed for the needs of the growing science nearly a hundred years. They observed that the common phenomenon of combustion concealed within its glowing bosom one of those central or fontal facts, on the discovery of which the history of science is continually turning. Pursuing this clew, which the reader of this outline will now recognise as older than the time of Aristotle, although I never laid firmly hold of until that of Beecher, they generalised the phe- I nomenon itself in the first place. Their metals, with the quite intelligible exceptions of gold and silver, were changed into rusts or calces, or artificial ores, resembling chalk-powder or brick-dust when heated in exposure to the air of the fire ; and this change they perceived to be identical with I what is passed upon brimstone, phosphorus, or any other ordinary com- j bustible when it burns with flame. Indeed, the metal tin burns with a j surrounding glow, which resembles flame so closely as to have hinted the rest of the secret ; no secret now-a-days, since we have metals which take fire when thrown into water, and since we burn iron-wire in oxygen like a wax-match in the air ; but a great attainment for the day, or rather the morning twilight, in which it was first made. Thus, then, in brief, was the whole science of chemistry, as it then stood, classified under two distinct and intelligible parts : the study of bodies before combustion, and that of bodies after combustion, implying of course the study of the vital act of j combustion itself; a very true and useful division so far as it reached, and certainly most important for the exigencies of the epoch. The chaos of chemical fact was thereby reduced to intellectual order, and made to I revolve round one great phenomenon as a centre. Similar things were brought together in spite of apparent dissimilarity, while unlike things were duly separated, notwithstanding of superficial resemblances, and a genuine reformation or new creation was fairly begun, with amazing sagacity and intelligence. It is surely difficult to understand how men like Dumas and Liebig (to name no smaller names) can content themselves with asserting that chemistry began with Lavoisier, except by supposing them wholly destitute of the historical sense, and incapable of seeing that their own rockfast-Lavoisierianlsm is also doomed ; not indeed to be over- thrown (for nothing that is partly true can ever be wholly overthrown), but superseded just as completely as phlogiston, alchemy, or polypharmacy. It would be quite as rational for a geologist to date the origin of the visible world from the tertiary series, or the diluvial beds of Paris and London, as to trace the rise of chemistry no farther back than the great Parisian lawgiver of the science.
But the old chemists of whom we now speak were of course not satisfied
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CHAMBERS’S PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE.
with the discovery of the true analogy that exists between the metallic » calces and the acids, and their consequent new classification of bodies ; but they proceeded to interpret the phenomenon of combustion itself, that % seemingly sole and singular agent of chemical transformations. Nor was - an interpretation far to seek, although it required astonishing ingenuity to apply it right and left, so as to compact the rude and disjected members of a growing chemistry into one luminous body of scientific thought. It has ' already been hinted that Greece has ever been the Ariadne to furnish our sturdy, erratic, and triumphant European Theseus with the clew to the i labyrinth it behoves him from time to time to penetrate. The notion that fire is an actual and substantial, though subtile element of nature, was first kindled by Empedocles long centuries before Christ : before it was handed over to the Arabians, it had begun to flicker, and it played a very small