Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/103

Rh good leaden alembic; put on the cap, and you will distill the burning water. It should be kept in a glass vessel tightly closed." The Munich manuscript adds: "These are the virtue and propererties of the inflammable water: A rag moistened with it and set on fire will burn with a great flame. When the fire is extinguished the cloth will be found unharmed. If you dip your finger in this water and then put fire to it, it will burn like a candle and not suffer any wounding." This was in fact a prestidigitator's trick; and the part those people played is manifest in the beginnings of a large number of inventions in antiquity and the middle ages. In any case the facts pointed to in this description are exact, and show how first observers are often struck by real or apparent properties of bodies, even though they be insignificant. Frequently, too, they complicate operations by superfluous if not annoying details, to which, according to the theories by which they are guided, they attach the same importance as to the rest. For instance, in the first receipt of Marcus Græcus is a direction to add sulphur previous to the distillation, which occurs likewise in a book by Al Farabi, transcribed into another manuscript of the same period, as well as in Porta's Natural Magic, which was composed in the sixteenth century. It is therefore not accidental. It is the product of a theory which is expounded at length in several texts, held by the chemists of the time, that the great moisture of wine is opposed to its inflammability. To counteract this they added salts or sulphur, the dryness of which, they said, augmented the combustible properties. One of these old authors refers, in support of his theory, to dry wood and green wood, unequally combustible, according to the season when they were cut and the proportion of moisture they contain.

We should recollect also that volatility and combustibility were then confounded and called sulphurity, a term which was still applied in this sense in the time of Stahl, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. These ideas go back to the Grecian alchemists, who called every volatile liquid and every sublimate sulphurous (or divine) water. In this we can see the origin of those complicated preparations, so hard to understand now, which were employed by the old alchemists. They tried to communicate to bodies the qualities in which they were lacking by adding to them substances in which those qualities were supposed to be concentrated. Hence sulphur was added to wine in the belief that it would render the manifestation of its inflammable principle easier.

The first man of science known by name who spoke of alcohol is Arnaud de Villeneuve, who was of a date posterior to the composition of these writings. He is commonly spoken of as the author of the discovery, though he never himself presented such a claim. He only spoke of alcohol as a preparation known in his