As will be seen from this passage, Cusanus had many more ideas than merely the accurate estimation of the pulse frequency when he suggested the use of the water-clock. Evidently the thought had come to him that the specific gravity of the substances, that is, their weight in comparison to the weight of water, might be valuable information. Before his time, physicians had depended only on the color and the taste of the urine for diagnostic purposes. He proposed that they should weigh it, and even suggested that they should weigh, also, the blood, I suppose in case of venesection, for comparison's sake. He also thought that the comparative weight of various roots, stems, leaves, juices of plants might give hints for the therapeutic uses of these substances. This is the sort of idea that we are apt to think of as typically modern. Specific gravities and atomic weights have been more than once supposed to represent laws in therapeutics, which so far, however, we have not succeeded in finding, but it is interesting to realize that it is nearly five hundred years since the first thought in this line was clearly expressed by a distinguished thinker and scientific writer.

There are many interesting expressions in Cusanus' writings which contradict most of the impressions commonly entertained with regard to the scholars of the Middle Ages. It is usually assumed that they did not think seriously, but speculatively, that they feared to think for themselves, neglected the study of nature around them, considered authority the important source of knowledge, and were as far as possible from the standpoint of modern scientific students and investigators. Here is a passage from Nicholas, on knowing and thinking, that might well have been written by a great intellectual man at any time in the world's history, and that could only emanate from a profound scholar at any time.

The career of Nicholas of Cusa is interesting, because it sums up so many movements, and, above all, educational currents in the fifteenth century. He was born in the first year of the century, and lived to be sixty-four. He was the son of a wine grower, and attracted the attention of his teachers because of his intellectual qualities. In spite of comparatively straitened circumstances, then, he was afforded the best opportunities of the time for education. He went first to the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, the intellectual cradle of so many of the scholars of this century. Such men as Erasmus, Conrad Mutianus, Johann Sintheim, Hermann von dem Busche, whom Strauss calls "the missionary of human wisdom," and the teacher of most of these, Alexander Hegius, who has been termed the schoolmaster of Germany, with Nicholas of Cusa and Rudolph Agricola and others, who might readily be mentioned, are the fruits of the teaching of these schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, in one of which Thomas à Kempis, the author of "The Imitation of Christ," was, for seventy years out of his long life of ninety, a teacher.

Cusanus succeeded so well at school that he was later sent to the University of Heidelberg, and subsequently to Padua, where he took up the study of Roman law, receiving his doctorate at the age of twenty-three. This series of educational opportunities will be surprising only to those who do not know educational realities at the beginning of the fifteenth century. There has never been a time when a serious seeker after knowledge could find more inspiration. On his return to Germany, Father Krebs became canon of the cathedral in Coblenz. This gave him a modest income, and leisure for intellectual work which was eagerly employed. He was scarcely more than thirty when he was chosen as a delegate to the Council at Basel. After this he was made Archdeacon of the Cathedral of Lüttich, and from this time his rise in ecclesiastical preferment was rapid. He had attracted so much attention at the Council of Basel that he was chosen as a legate of the Pope for the bringing about certain reforms in Germany. Subsequently he was sent on ecclesiastical missions to the Netherlands, and even to Constantinople. At the early age of forty he was made a Cardinal. After this he was always considered as one of the most important consultors of the Papacy in all matters relating to Germany. During the last twenty-five years of his life in all the relations of the Holy See to Germany, appeal was constantly made to the wisdom, the experience, and the thoroughly conservative, yet foreseeing, judgment of this son of the people, whose education had lifted him up to be one of the leaders of men in Europe.

It was during this time that he wrote most of his books on mathematics, which have earned for him a prominent place in Cantor's "History of Mathematics," about a score of pages being devoted to his work. Much of his thinking was done while riding on horseback or in the rude vehicles of the day on the missions to which he was sent as Papal Legate. He is said to have worked out the formula for the cycloid curve while watching the path described by flies that had lighted on the wheels of his carriage, and were carried forward and around by them. His scientific books, though they included such startling anticipations of Copernicus' doctrines as we have already quoted (Copernicus did not publish the first sketch of his theory for more than a quarter of a century after Cusanus' death), far from disturbing his ecclesiastical advancement or injuring his career as a churchman, seem actually to have been considered as additional reasons for considering him worthy of confidence and consultation.

As the result of his careful studies of conditions in Germany, he realized very clearly how much of unfortunate influence the political status of the German people, with their many petty rulers and the hampering of development consequent upon the trivial rivalries, the constant bickerings, and the inordinate jealousies of these numerous princelings, had upon his native country. Accordingly, towards the end of his life he sketched what he thought would be the ideal political status for the German people. As in everything that he wrote, he went straight to the heart of the matter and, without mincing words, stated just exactly what he thought ought to be done. Considering that this scheme of Cusanus for the prosperity and right government of the German people was not accomplished until more than four centuries after his death, it is interesting, indeed, to realize how this clergyman of the middle of the fifteenth century should have come to any such thought. Nothing, however, makes it clearer than this, that it is not time that fosters thinking, but that great men at any time come to great thoughts. Cusanus wrote:

Cusanus' life and work stand, then, as a type of the accomplishment, the opportunities, the power of thought, the practical scholarship, the mathematical accuracy, the fine scientific foresight of a scholar of the fifteenth century. For us, in medicine, it is interesting indeed to realize that it is from a man of this kind that a great new departure in medicine with regard to the employment of exact methods of diagnosis had its first suggestion in modern times. The origin of that suggestion is typical. It has practically always been true that it was not the man who had exhausted, or thought that he had done so, all previous medical knowledge, who made advances in medicine for us. It has nearly always been a young man early in his career, and at a time when, as yet, his mind was not overloaded with the medical theories of his own time. Cusanus was probably not more than thirty when he made the suggestion which represents the first practical hint for the use of laboratory methods in modern medicine. It came out of his thoughtful consideration of medical problems rather than from a store of garnered information as to what others thought. It is a lesson in the precious value of breadth of education and serious training of mind for real progress at all times.

XIV

BASIL VALENTINE, LAST OF THE ALCHEMISTS, FIRST OF THE CHEMISTS

This is one of the preliminary maxims of a treatise on medicine written by a physician born not later than the first half of the fifteenth century, and who may have lived even somewhat earlier. We are so prone to think of the men of that time as utterly dependent on authority, not daring to follow their own observation, suspecting nature, and almost sure to be convinced that only by going counter to her could success in the treatment of disease be obtained, that it is a surprise to most people to find how completely the attitude of mind, that is supposed to be so typically modern in this regard, was anticipated full four centuries ago. There are other expressions of this same great physician and medical writer, Basil Valentine, which serve to show how faithfully he strove with the lights that he had to work out the treatment of patients, just as we do now, by trying to find out nature's way, so as to imitate her beneficent processes and purposes. It is quite clear that he is but one of many faithful, patient observers and experimenters—true scientists in the best sense of the word—who lived in all the centuries of the Middle Ages.

Speculations and experiments with regard to the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone, and the transmutation of metals, are presumed to have filled up all the serious interests of the alchemists, supposed to be almost the only scientists of those days. As a matter of fact, however, men were making original observations of profound significance, and these were considered so valuable by their contemporaries that, though printing had not yet been invented, even the immense labor involved in the manifold copying of large folio volumes by the slow hand process did not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men so numerously that they were preserved in many copies for future generations, until the printing press came to perpetuate them.

Of this there is abundant evidence in the preceding pages as regards medicine, and, above all, surgery, while a summary of accomplishments of workers in other departments will be found in Appendix II, "Science at the Medieval Universities."

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the influence of the peculiarly active light thrown upon our nineteenth century chemical theories by the discovery of radium, and our observations on radio-active elements generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time chemical observers, whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific, or, at most, but a caricature of real science, and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was considered so absurd. It is interesting in the light of this to recall that the idea that the elementary substances were essentially distinct from each other, and that it would be impossible under any circumstances to convert one element into another, belongs entirely to the nineteenth century. Even so deeply scientific a mind as that of Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to acknowledge the tradition, that came to be accepted subsequent to his time, of the absurdity of metallic transformation. On the contrary, he believed quite formally in transmutation as a basic chemical principle, and declared that it might be expected to occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connection with metallic copper, and concluded that this was a manifestation of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the other.

With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that, indeed, all the so-called radioactivities of the heavy metals are probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work, the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject for amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working hypothesis. The doctrine of "matter and form," taught for so many centuries by the scholastic philosophers, which proclaimed that all matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material substratum, and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more acknowledged verisimilitude, or lies at least closer to the generally accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists, than it has at any time for the last two or three centuries. Not only the great physicists, but also the great chemists, are speculating along lines that suggest the existence of but one form of matter, modified according to the energies that it possesses under a varying physical and chemical environment. This is, after all, only a restatement in modern times of the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquin, in the thirteenth century.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of the men, who, dominated by some of the earlier scholastic ideas, by the tradition of the possibility of finding the philosopher's stone, which would transmute the baser metals into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most interesting of these—indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists—is the man whose only name that we know is that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a monk, however, there seems to be no room for doubt, for his writings give abundant evidence of it, and, besides, in printed form they began to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed to a monastic source, unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some monastery.

This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have) did so much for the science of the composition of substances that he eminently deserves the designation that has been given him of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves also the title of the Founder of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, not only because of the value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain scientific geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind, it is a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of observation in others, and to be the founder of a new school of thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did, and, in the Renaissance, the incentive from his writings for such men as Paracelsus is easy to appreciate.

Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigation alone, but must have owed, as well as given, many a suggestion to his contemporaries.

Some ten years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, professor of physiology in the University of Cambridge, England, was invited to deliver the Lane Lectures at the Cooper Medical College in San Francisco, he took for his subject "The History of Physiology." In the course of his lecture on "The Rise of Chemical Physiology" he began with the name of Basil Valentine, who first attracted men's attention to the many chemical substances around them that might be used in the treatment of disease, and said of him:

It is a little bit hard in our time for most people to understand just how such a development of thoroughly scientific chemical notions, with investigations for their practical application, should have come before the end of the Middle Ages. This difficulty of understanding, however, we are coming to realize in recent years, is entirely due to our ignorance of the period. We have known little or nothing about the science of the Middle Ages, because it was hidden away in rare old books, in rather difficult Latin, not easy to get at, and still less easy to understand always, and we have been prone to conclude that since we knew nothing about it, there must have been nothing. Just inasmuch as we have learned something definite about the medieval scholars, our admiration has increased. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, in his Harveian Oration, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1900, on "Science and Medieval Thought" (London, 1901), declared that "the schoolmen, in digging for treasure, cultivated the field of knowledge even for Galileo and Harvey, for Newton and Darwin." He might have added that they had laid foundations in all our modern sciences, in chemistry quite as well as in astronomy, physiology, and the medical sciences, in mathematics and botany.

In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were, perhaps, even more noteworthy than those in any other department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist, and that his printed works fill some fifteen folio volumes, he somehow found the time to make many observations for himself, and performed numberless experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of chemistry accord him his proper place, and hail him as a great founder in chemistry, and a pioneer in original investigation.

Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas' pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are said to owe the use, in the Western world at least, of the word amalgam, which he first employed in describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine transmutation of metals.

Albertus Magnus' other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the scientific ways of his great master, devoting himself almost entirely to the physical sciences. Altogether he wrote some eighteen treatises on chemical subjects. For a long time it was considered that he was the inventor of gunpowder, though this is now known to have been introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied gunpowder and various other explosive combinations in considerable detail, and it is for this reason that he obtained the undeserved reputation of being an original discoverer in this line. How well he realized how much might be accomplished by means of the energy stored up in explosives, can, perhaps, be best appreciated from the fact that he suggested that boats would go along the rivers and across seas without either sails or oars, and that carriages would go along the streets without horse or man power. He considered that man would eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures, and of utilizing their energies for his purposes without danger. It is curiously interesting to find, as we begin the twentieth century, and gasolene is so commonly used for the driving of automobiles and motor boats, and is being introduced even into heavier transportation as the most available source of energy for suburban traffic, at least, that this generation should only be fulfilling the idea of the old Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century, who prophesied that in explosives there was the secret of eventually manageable energy for transportation purposes.

Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in great scientists as the thirteenth, and yet, in the second half of the thirteenth, there was a Pope, John XXI, who had been a physician and professor of medicine before his election to the Papacy, three of whose scientific treatises—one on the transmutation of metals, which he considers an impossibility, at least as far as the manufacture of gold and silver was concerned; a treatise on diseases of the eyes, to which good authorities have not hesitated to give lavish praise for its practical value, considering the conditions in which it was written; and, finally, his treatise on the preservation of the health, written when he was himself over eighty years of age—are all considered by good authorities as worthy of the best scientific spirit of the time.

During the fourteenth century, Arnold of Villanova, the inventor of nitric acid, and the two Hollanduses, kept up the tradition of original investigation in chemistry. Altogether there are some dozen treatises from these three men on chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly did their work in a spirit of thoroughly frank, original investigation. They were more interested in minerals than in any other class of substances, but did not waste much time on the question of transmutation of metals. Professor Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, said, in his "History of Chemistry," many years ago, that the Hollanduses give very clear descriptions of their processes of treating minerals in investigating their composition, and these serve to show that their knowledge was by no means entirely theoretical, or acquired only from books.

It is not surprising, then, to have a great investigating pharmacologist come along sometime about the beginning of the fifteenth century, when, according to the best authorities, Basil Valentine was born. From traditions he seems to have had a rather long life, and his years run nearly parallel with his century. His career is a typical example of the personally obscure and intellectually brilliant lives which the old monks lived. Probably in nothing have recent generations been more deceived in historical matters than in their estimation of the intellectual attainments and accomplishment of the old monks. The more that we know of them, not from second-hand authorities, but from their own books and from what they accomplished in art and architecture, in agriculture, in science of all kinds, the more do we realize what busy men they were, and appreciate what genius they often brought to the solution of great problems. We have had much negative pseudo-information brought together with the definite purpose of discrediting monasticism, and now that positive information is gradually being accumulated, it is almost a shock to find how different are the realities of the story of the intellectual life during the Middle Ages from what many writers had pictured them.

To those who may be surprised that a man who did great things in medicine should have lived during the fifteenth century, it may be well to recall the names and a little of the accomplishment of the men of this period, who were Basil Valentine's contemporaries, at least in the sense that some portion of their lives and influence was coeval with his. Before the end of this century Columbus had discovered America, and by no happy accident, for many men of his generation did correspondingly great work. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa had developed mathematics and applied mathematical ideas to the heavens, so that he could announce the conclusion that the earth was a star, like the other stars, and moved in the heavens as they do. Contemporary with Cusanus was Regiomontanus, who has been proclaimed the father of modern astronomy, and a distinguished mathematician. Toscanelli, the Florentine astronomer, whose years run almost parallel with those of the fifteenth century, did fine scholarly work, which deeply influenced Columbus and the great navigators of the time. The universities in Italy were attracting students from all over Europe, and such men as Linacre and Dr. Caius went down there from England. Raphael was but a young man at the end of the century, but he had done some noteworthy painting before it closed. Leonardo da Vinci was born just about the middle of the century, and did some marvellous work before the end of that century. Michael Angelo was only twenty-five at the close of the century, but he, too, did fine work, even at this early age. Among the other great Italian painters of this century are Fra Angelico, Perugino, Raphael's master, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, the pupil of his uncle, Vasari, almost as distinguished, Botticelli, Titian, and very many others, who would have been famous leaders in art in any other but this supremely great period.

It was not only in Italy, however, that there was a wonderful outburst of genius at this time, for Germany also saw the rise of a number of great men during this period. Jacob Wimpheling, the "Schoolmaster of Germany," as he has been called, whose educational work did much to determine the character of German education for two centuries, was born in 1450. Rudolph Agricola, who influenced the intellectual Europe of this time deeply, was born in 1443. Erasmus, one of the greatest of scholars, of teachers, and of controversialists, was born in 1467. Johann Reuchlin, the great linguist, who, next to Erasmus, is the most important character in the German Renaissance, was born in 1455. Then there was Sebastian Brant, the author of "The Ship of Fools," and Alexander Hegius, both of this same period. The most influential of them all, Thomas à Kempis, who died in 1471, and whose little book, "The Following of Christ," has influenced every generation deeply ever since, was probably a close contemporary of Basil Valentine. When one knows what European, and especially German scholars, were accomplishing at this time, no room is left for surprise that Basil Valentine should have lived and done work in medicine at this period that was to influence deeply the after history of medicine.

Most of what Basil Valentine did was accomplished in the first half of the fifteenth century. Coming, as he did, before the invention of printing, when the spirit of tradition was more rife and dominating than it has been since, it is almost needless to say that there are many curious legends associated with his name. Two centuries before his time, Roger Bacon, doing his work in England, had succeeded in attracting so much attention even from the common people, because of his wonderful scientific discoveries, that his name became a byword, and many strange magical feats were attributed to him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard, even in the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number of the same sort of myths attached themselves to the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth century. He was proclaimed in popular story to have been a wonderful magician. Even his manuscript, it was said, had not been published directly, but had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached to his monastery, and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too, like Roger Bacon, was a product of the thirteenth century. It seems reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his works enables the historian of science to place his writing within half a century of the discovery of America.

One of the myths that have gathered around the name of Basil Valentine, because it has become a commonplace in philology, has probably made him more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use about half a century ago, in the chapter on antimony, there was a story that students, if I may judge from my own experience, never forgot. It was said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day when the swine of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up, together with some other refuse. Just when they were finishing it, the monk discovered what they were doing. He feared the worst from it, but took the occasion to observe the effect upon the swine very carefully. He found that, after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine developed an enormous appetite, and became fatter than any of the others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to good purpose on the members of the community. Some of the monks in the monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, and most of them were rather thin, and he thought that the putting on of a little fat, provided it could be accomplished without infringement of the rule, might be a good thing for them. Accordingly, he administered, surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however, was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to one, though less authentic, version of the story, some of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, perished as the result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the better version, they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had discovered antimony, that is, opposed to monks. It might be good for hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were.[30]

Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from anti and monachus than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in nature.

Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus—to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures—was one of the great geniuses, who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern pharmaceutics. Following Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the work of this trio of men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the Renaissance in medicine as in art—dominated medical treatment, or at least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and their influence is still felt in drug-giving.

While we do not know the absolute data of either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine and are not sure of the exact period even in which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and various salts of the metals, and above all introduced antimony to the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the observational method which he employed furnished an immense amount of knowledge, and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may be. For a time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was only replaced by venesection.

The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients, too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about its working.

The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony."[31] It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most important drug in the pharmacopœia down almost to the middle of the nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or that the author of the books that go under the name was a monk it would be found in the introduction to this volume, which not only states that fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I quote the first paragraph of this introduction because it emphasizes this. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as published in London in 1678. Curiously enough, seeing the obscurity surrounding Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who made the translation. The translator apologizes somewhat for the deeply religious spirit of the book, but considers that he was not justified in eliminating any of this. The paragraph is left in the quaint, old-fashioned form so eminently suited to the thoughts of the old master, and the spelling and use of capitals is not changed.

This book, though the title might seem to indicate it, is not devoted entirely to the study of antimony, but contains many important additions to the chemistry of the time. For instance, Basil Valentine explains in this work how what he calls the spirit of salt might be obtained. He succeeded in manufacturing this material by treating common salt with oil of vitriol and heat. From the description of the uses to which he put the end product of his chemical manipulation, it is evident that under the name of spirit of salt he is describing what we now know as hydrochloric acid. This is said to be the first definite mention of it in the history of science, and the method suggested for its preparation is not very different from that employed even at the present time. He also suggests in his volume how alcohol may be obtained in high strengths. He distilled the spirit obtained from wine over carbonate of potassium, and thus succeeded in depriving it of a great proportion of its water. We have said that he was deeply interested in the philosopher's stone. Naturally this turned his attention to the study of metals, and so it is not surprising to find that he succeeded in formulating a method by which metallic copper could be obtained. The material used for the purpose was copper pyrites, which was changed to an impure sulphate of copper by the action of oil of vitriol and moist air. The sulphate of copper occurred in solution, and the copper could be precipitated from it by plunging an iron bar into it. Basil Valentine recognized the presence of this peculiar yellow metal, and studied some of its qualities. He does not seem to have been quite sure, however, whether the phenomenon that he witnessed was not really a transmutation of at least some of the iron into copper as a consequence of the other chemicals present. There are some observations on chemical physiology, and especially with regard to respiration, in the book on antimony which show their author to have anticipated the true explanation of the theory of respiration. He states that animals breathe because air is needed to support their life, and that all the animals exhibit the phenomenon of respiration. He even insists that the fishes, though living in water, breathe air, and he adduces in support of this idea the fact that whenever a river is entirely frozen the fishes die. The reason for this being, according to this old-time physiological chemist, not that the fishes are frozen to death, but that they are not able to obtain air in the ice as they did in the water, and consequently perish.

There are many testimonials to the practical character of all his knowledge and his desire to apply it for the benefit of humanity. The old monk could not repress the expression of his impatience with physicians who gave to patients for "diseases of which they knew little, remedies of which they knew less." For him it was an unpardonable sin for a physician not to have faithfully studied the various mixtures that he prescribed for his patients, and not to know not only their appearance and taste and effect, but also the limits of their application. Considering that at the present time it is a frequent source of complaint that physicians often prescribe remedies with even whose physical appearance they are not familiar and whose composition is often quite unknown to them, this complaint of the old-time chemist alchemist will be all the more interesting for the modern physician. It is evident that when Basil Valentine allows his ire to get the better of him it is because of his indignation over the quacks who were abusing medicine and patients in his time, as they have ever since. There is a curious bit of aspersion on mere book learning in the passage that has a distinctly modern ring, and one feels the truth of Russell Lowell's expression that to read a classic, no matter how antique, is like reading a commentary on the morning paper, so up-to-date does genius ever remain: