Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/390

378 he understood much more by it than the separation by beat of two metals of different melting points. Albucasis, a famous alchemist of the eleventh century, speaks of the process in less doubtful terms, and late in the thirteenth century the art of distillation and the preparation, properties, and uses of alcohol were clearly described by two European alchemists, Raymond Lully and Armand de Villeneuve.

In view of the fierce and indeed not undeserved abuse that has been levied against distilled liquors, it is interesting to note that for some hundreds of years after its discovery alcohol was distinctly the most valuable product of chemistry. The old alchemists went wild over it. They wondered at its power of dissolving oils and resins and balsams, calling it oleum vini and balsamus universalis, and making with it varnishes and perfumes and cosmetics, by the sale of which they replenished their not overfilled purses. They admired the clear, colorless, smokeless flame with which it burned, and named it sulphur cæleste, in contradistinction to the ordinary or earthly sulphur, which burns by no means so pleasantly. They used it as a preservative, they used it for the preparation of their chemicals, and above all they used it as a medicine. For during many hundred years this aqua vitæ, water of life as it was almost universally called, was the most valuable medicine in their large but inefficient pharmacopœia. Each alchemist, each physician, prepared his own elixirs, his own cordials, and claimed miraculous results for his own particular nostrums: but the basis of them all was the same—namely, alcohol, sweetened with sugar, and flavored by distillation or infusion with herbs and spices. Some of these "cordials" or heart remedies exist at the present day in the form of the various liqueurs. The Chartreuse and Benedictine are simply the same old medicines, prepared after practically the same old