Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/838

818 was an amateur alchemist, received by mail a little box containing two packages of powder, one red and the other white, with directions for using them. He was thus able to enjoy the pleasure of himself changing lead into "gold" and "silver." From the "gold" he struck a few hundred ducats, bearing on one side his name and effigy, and on the other the lion of Hesse and his initials, E. L. From the "silver" he struck a hundred thalers bearing his name and likeness on one side, and on the other the inscription "Sic placuit Deo in tribulationibus" ("Thus it has pleased God in tribulations"), 1717, with the lion of Hesse and his initials, surrounded by four crowns.

These operations made so much stir that the Academy of Sciences was moved by it; and in 1722 the chemist Geoff roy was charged to demonstrate to the learned company that these extraordinary achievements were a pure fraud. In the report, which he read on the 15th of April, he said: "Since the main intention of the operators is usually to show gold or silver in the place of the minerals which they pretend to transmute, they sometimes use double crucibles or cupels, or they put salts of gold or silver in the bottom of them; they then cover the bottom with a paste made by mixing crucible-dust with gum-water or wax; doing it so that this false bottom shall seem to be the real bottom. At other times they put gold or silver dust in a hole made in a piece of charcoal; or they saturate charcoal with solutions of those metals and then reduce the mass to a powder, in order to project it upon the substances which they are going to transmute.

"They use rods with hollowed ends containing in the cavities gold or silver filings, and stopped up with sawdust of the same wood. Stirring their molten matter with these rods, the sticks burn, leaving in the crucible the metal with which they have been charged. In an endless variety of ways they mix gold or silver with the substances with which they work. A small quantity of gold or silver will not show in a large quantity of such metallic substances as the regulus of antimony, lead, or copper. Salts of gold and silver can very easily be mixed with salts of lead, antimony, and mercury. Grains or nuggets of gold and silver can be inclosed in lead. Gold may be whitened with quicksilver and made to pass for tin. The collection of gold and silver from the substances with which they have been mixed may be made to pass for transmutation.

"All that goes on in the hands of these people should be watched. For the aqua fortis or aqua regia which they use is often already charged with solutions of gold or silver. The papers in which they wrap their chemicals are sometimes loaded with salts of these metals; and the pasteboards they employ may conceal such salts in their thickness. Glass has been known to come out