Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/101

Rh The separation which is effected in these between volatile water and fixed matter is expressed as follows in the text of Olympiodorus, who lived at the beginning of the fifth century: "Earth is taken in the early morning, still impregnated with the dew which the rising sun lifts with its rays. It is then like a widow and deprived of its spouse, according to the oracles of Apollo. . . . By divine water I mean my dew, aërial water." In the same style Comarius, a writer of the seventh century, drew the allegorical picture of evaporation and the condensation that accompanies it, condensed liquids reacting on the solid products exposed to their action: "Tell us. . . how the blessed waters descend from above to visit the dead, stretched out, chained, and loaded down in darkness and shadow, in the interior of hades; . . . how new waters enter in, . . . come by the action of the fire; the cloud holds them up; it rises from the sea, sustaining the waters."

This singular language, this enthusiasm borrowing the most exalted religious formulas, need not surprise us. The men of that time, excepting a few superior geniuses, had not reached that state of calm and abstraction that permits the contemplation of scientific verities with a serene coolness. Their education, the symbolical traditions of ancient Egypt, and the gnostic ideas with which the first alchemists were all impregnated, did not allow them to preserve their even balance. They were transported and intoxicated, as it were, by the revelation of that hidden world of chemical transformations which appeared to the human mind for the first time.

In the first Greek treatises, all the active liquids of chemistry are confounded under the common name of divine water or waters. "Divine water is one in kind," they said; "but it is multiplied as to species, and admits of an infinite number of varieties and methods of treatment." They designated those varieties by the most various symbolical names, such as aërial water, fluvial water, dew, virginal milk, water of native sulphur, silver water, Attic honey, sea-foam, etc. Confusion was systematically engendered by this variety of denominations, for the avowed purpose of concealing the secrets of the alchemical fabrications from the vulgar and uninitiated. Although it is occasionally possible to discern something precise in the deliberate vagueness of the descriptions, there does not exist among them, so far as I know, any text that is applicable to the distillation of wine. It is barely possible that the principle of fractional distillation and the diversity of its successive products are indicated in one or two passages, but those passages appear to apply to the treatment of alkaline polysulphides or of organic sulphureted substances, which have nothing in common with alcohol.

I have not, moreover, met in the Arabic treatises on medicine