Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/652

634 were also created as well as vegetable substances, and have been in travail to produce seeds from which others could be engendered. Crystal is not so dead but that it is given to it to know how to separate itself from other waters, and from itself, with its angles and diamond-points, in the midst of them. Thus, mineral matters are not so inert but they bring forth and gradually produce most excellent things. These mineral matters are intermingled and unrecognized among the waters, in the matrix of the earth, so that every human and brute creature is engendered under a kind of water. The matters of metals are concealed in such a way that it is impossible for man to distinguish them before they are congealed, just as no one can tell that water in which salt is dissolved is saline without tasting it with his tongue." Then, replying to the alchemists who had recourse in their experiments to the highest furnace-temperatures then known, Palissy added, "When you have tried everything by fire, you will find that my saying is true, that water is the beginning and origin of all natural things." One could not reason more ingeniously respecting an idea wholly of the imagination, but which could hardly have been sounder, at a time when, chemistry not having yet put on a scientific character, the nature of the substances whose origin it was sought to ascertain was still almost unknown. Struck by the admirable regularity of the motions of the stars, a number of minds were led, by a mystical generalization, to draw from them consequences applicable to the phenomena of our planet. According to a doctrine that goes back to the Chaldeans, and is also found among the Egyptians, sidereal influences contribute to the maturing (that is, to the subterranean transformation) of mineral substances. Mysterious relations were supposed between the celestial bodies of our solar system and metals, the luster of which has some resemblance to the color of the stars. Conformably to the principle of likes, gold corresponded with the sun, silver with the moon, iron with Mars, copper with Venus, lead with Saturn, and tin with Jupiter. Strange as it may seem, this fancy had not been abandoned two centuries ago. An old German practical miner's manual, the "Bergbüchlein," the earliest known edition of which is dated in 1505, contains figures in which metalliferous veins may be seen running into the interior of the earth, and in the sky the planets which correspond respectively with the various metals, and from which the generative effluviæ are flowing. "With the birth and growth of a metallic mineral," it is said in the book, "are involved, on the one side an agent, and on the other a subordinate substance or matter, which is capable of being set into activity, like something in fermentation. The general agent is the sky, with its movements, the revolution of its planets, and its luminous radiation. This is why each metallic