Page:A History of Hindu Chemistry Vol 1.djvu/144

 Sassanian king Nashirván, (A. D. 531-572), visited India to acquire proficiency in the Indian sciences.

Thomson, Hoefer, Kopp, and Berthelot have done ample justice to the claims of the Arabians as the originators or, at any rate, as the propagators of alchemy in Europe in the middle ages. M. Berthelot, indeed, has recently shown that the ideas and theories, as regards alchemy, humoral pathology and physiology, which were promulgated in the writings of Geber, Rases, Avicenna, Bubacar and others, were essentially Greek in origin, though extended and improved upon by the Arabians. The French savant has, however, presented only one side of the