Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 01.djvu/140

ALCHEMY pire that that emperor is said to have ordered all Egyptian works treating of the chemistry of gold and silver to be burned. For at that time multitudes of books on this art appeared, written by Alexandrian monks and by hermits, but bearing famous names of antiquity such as Democritus, Pythagoras, and Hermes.

At a later period, the Arabs, who had enthusiastically adopted Aristotle from the Greeks, appropiated the astrology and alchemy of the Persians and the Jews of Mesopotamia and Arabia; and to them European alchemy is directly traceable. The school of polypharmacy, as it has been called, flourished in Arabia during the caliphates of the Abbassides. They worked with gold and mercury, arsenic and sulphur, salts and acids; and had, in short, become familiar with a large range of what are now called chemicals. Gebir discovered corrosive sublimate, the process of cupellation of gold and silver, and distillation. To the Arab alchemists we owe the terms alcohol, alkali, borax, elixir.

From the Arabs, alchemy found its way through Spain into Europe generally, and speedily became entangled with the fantastic subtleties of the scholastic philosophy. In the Middle Ages, the monks occupied themselves with alchemy. Pope John XXII. took great delight in it, but denounced the searchers for gold "who promise more than they can perform, and the art was afterward forbidden by his successor. The earliest authentic works on European alchemy now extant are those of Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and Albertus Magnus (1193-1280). Roger Bacon, who was acquainted with gunpowder, condemns magic necromancy, charms, and all such things, but believes in the convertibility of the inferor metals into gold. Still, he does not profess to have ever effected the conversion. Albertus Magnus had a great mastery of the practical chemistry of his times; he was acquainted with alum, caustic alkali, and the purification of the royal metals by means of lead. In addition to the sulphur-and-mercury theory of the metals, drawn from Gebir, he regarded the element water as still nearer the soul of nature than either of these bodies. He is the first to speak of the affinity of bodies, a term he uses in reference to the action of sulphur on metals. Thomas Aquinas also wrote on alchemy, and was the first to employ the word amalgam. Raymond Lully is another great name in the annals of alchemy. He was the first to introduce the use of chemical symbols, his system consisting of a scheme of arbitrary hieroglyphics. He wrote more than 500 works on alchemy.

Basil Valentine introduced antimony into medical use. He, along with some previous alchemists, regarded salt, sulphur, and mercury as the three bodies contained in the metals. His practical knowledge was great; he knew how to precipitate iron from solution by potash, and was acquainted with many similar processes, so that he is ranked as the founder of analytical chemistry.

But more famous than all was Paracelsus, in whom alchemy proper may be said to have culminated. He held, with Basil Valentine, that the elements of compound bodies were salt, sulphur and mercury—representing respectively earth, air, and water, fire being already regarded as an imponderable—but these substances were in his system purely representative. All kinds of matter were reducible under one or other of these typical forms; everything was either a salt, a sulphur, or a mercury, or, like the metals, it was a mixed or compound. There was one element, however, common to the four; a fifth essence or quintessence of creation; an unknown and only true element, of which the four generic principles were nothing but derivative forms or embodiments: in other words, he inculcated the dogma that there is only one real elementary matter, nobody knows what. This one prime element of things he appears to have considered to be the universal solvent of which the alchemists were in quest, and to express which he introduced the term alkahest.

After Paracelsus, the alchemists of Europe became divided into two classes. The one class was composed of men of diligence and sense, who devoted themselves to the discovery of new compounds and reactions. The other class took up the visionary, fantastical side of the older alchemy, and carried it to a degree of extravagance before unknown. Instead of useful work, they compiled mystical trash into books, and fathered them on Hermes, Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, and other really great men. These visionaries formed themselves into Rosicrucian societies and other secret associations.

ALCIBIADES, son of Clinias and Deinomache, was born in Athens about 450 B. C. He lost his father in the battle of Coronea (447), so was brought up in the house of his kinsman Pericles. His friend Socrates was unable to restrain his love of luxury and dissipation, which found ample means of gratification in the wealth that accrued to him by his union with Hipparete. He first bore arms in the expedition against Po-