Paracelsus constantly excusing himself from the charge of witchcraft is occasionally more than usually abstruse. For some ailments, he says, a small star must be made from an old horse-shoe found in a road. This must be fashioned at certain planetary hours, stamped with astrological signs, and buried in a running stream. This remedy proved effectual in nine days, and drove back the curse upon the witch who had pronounced it.

Now, that these things were all done by certain rules, we know. The only wonder is that any mind could have granted the postulates on which, once granted, the arguments incontestably started.

While these were the joints at the magical banquet, the side-dishes were equally remarkable. The rarest, most loathsome, and eccentric ingredients were eagerly sought by the alchemists for their medicines. Human bones, moss that grew upon a skull, man's fat, and human blood were blended with bruised carrion, flies, and oil of roses. All nature was ransacked, from the iceberg to the graveyard, for objects of supposed virtue and power. Nor were these of any efficacy unless mixed when "the sun is in Taurus," or when "the moon is in the house of Jupiter, that is, in Pisces." Of one particular seal Paracelsus says: "This is the second seal that I knew after long search and inquiry, and which, according to the art that I profess, I have often used to the shame and scorn of my adversaries, so that they have stood amazed like asses, and durst not open their mouths."

Yes, those little pieces of gold, perhaps now mistaken by the antiquarian for coins of extinct nations, lying in the dusty drawers of goldsmiths and pawnbrokers, once hung round the necks of emperors and queens, gave the assassin courage to face his victim's sword, and supplied treacherous hope to dying men in jails and prison vaults. Lovers have bound them on with sighs; generals tied them under their armor with awe. They have cured and gladdened, and were yet but mere dull metal figures crossed and scratched. So potent is imagination.

CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Now the old genii are bottled up safely in red bottles in druggists' shops, we can

Paracelsus was the first to assert that all the universe was formed of three substances-salt, sulphur, and mercury, and not sulphur and mercury alone. The creation, in fact, he seemed to consider a great chemical experiment. This body was earth, the spirit water, and the soul fire; and heat and cold, which are fire and water, are every thing: by earth alone a creature assumes form.

Earth brings forth nothing, but is a receptacle for all projections and distillations of antagonistic water, air, and fire. It putrefies, multiplies, and separates, and is, in fact, the crucible in which all nature's chemicals are thrown. The heavy sink; the light come to its surface. It is the nurse, the womb, the grave, the mother, the passive principle. It is the caput mortuum or residuum of creation, hereafter to be calcined into a new and crystalline world.

Earth, the grossest and most lumpish of the four provinces of the elements, is dull and heavy, cold, dry, and tempered with water; without fixed, but within volatile, and every where porous as a sponge. It is a casket, a treasure-room. In its center is the eternal fire, or central_sun, corresponding to the celestial one. It has a pure and an impure part. Its center is hollow, and is the seed ground of the elements. Mixed with water it gives life to created things: mixed with the air it draws them up, in its center it is mixed with fire. It is the center of the world and of the

elements.

Water is the other tangible element worthier than the earth and heavier. It conveys to the earth the seed the fire distills from the air. It has three degrees of purity. The purer part becomes heavier and air; the center is in the heart of the sea. It preserves the earth from burning, and spreads the vital principle through the earth. The central fire distills the water, and the pressure of the air rolls the waters round the earth; the ebbing and flowing of the sea arise from the magnetic attraction and repulsion of the two poles.

All these elements are allies and enemies. The fire preserves the earth from being drowned or melted; the air the fire that it be not extinguished; the water the earth that it be not burnt.

The element of air was of higher rank than earth or water, its grosser part mingled with water. It was the life of man and all creatures; it is the dwelling-place of the soul. Without air, fire, plants, and men die; and it is full of divine virtue. In this element the Holy Spirit moved over chaos. By a magnetic power it draws to itself its nourishment of water. Fire is the purest element, hot, dry, and unctuous. It was the first created. Out of its grosser part was made the angels; then the sun, moon, and stars; the lowest of all is hell, and the purer the heavens, all of which have a sympathy to each other. The soul is an essence of pure elementary fire; it is the vail of God which destroys all created things that approach it. It is the most tractable of all the elements. As water purifies all fluid things, so does fire all that are fixed. The animal soul is pure fire; and the vegetable. elementary and grosser fire. Fire is stirred up by air, and air by a motion caused through a central nature, a will, a motive power and principle.

Man, these great refiners said, contained a world within his body-salt, sulphur, and mercury, earth, air, fire, and water, which, in fact, contain the three first; for all which is fat and flowing is fire or sulphur; all which is cold and earthy is salt or water; all which is dry and fixed is mercury. Man contains the quintessence of the elements. His heart is the earth with its central fire; blood is heat ruled over by a vital spirit, the soul; the mouth is the Arctic, and the belly the Antarctic pole.

Pure life is a balance of the elements. If any one predominate, that is life since the fall; if any tyrannize, that is death. Say water prevails, then earth, air, and fire unite and overcome water-digest, boil, and congeal. Then the hidden central fire, which is the life of all things, overcomes them all and separates.

Ever since the fall, men have grown nearer to corruption, said these men, and lives grow shorter. In some places, they allowed, where the air was more favorable and stars more propitious-as, say, at Zurich nature grew less deeply

tainted.

To obtain the uncorrupt element and restore the balance of nature, sages first sought to discover the Philosopher's stone, which contained the four elements, uncorrupted and perfectly balanced.

Their axioms were, that God, to preserve a balance of power, (a dogma as foolish in old philosophy as it is in modern politics,) ordained that all things should have antagonistic principles-the life of one to be the death of the other-that which produced one consuming another, and generating a third more noble. Dead creatures feed living creatures, and the change which is death is the necessary means by which substances interchange natures, and mutually feed each other. The farmer eats herbs and meat, then dies and turns to gases, which are air, and fire, and water, and earth, which eventually condense into plants, and pass as food into the flesh of beasts.

It is strange our two chief writers on physiognomy should have been Swiss, and both inhabitants of nearly the same locality.

Paracelsus, who all his life burrowed about among earth-stained miners, had studied their habits and learned their traditions. He had hoped to find some clue to his philosophical searches among those rude wielders of the pick and spade. He is fond of relating his experiences, describing the cheiromancy of mines, and of the great trees of gold and silver that grew, and shot forth their branches through clay, and loam, and sand. The deeper and broader the veins, he says, the older the mines, and the richer the metal. Different colored earths foretold different metals; but the best of all signs were the coruscations or luminous appearances seen in mines by night. The direction they took, their color, etc., all announced metal abundant, but not yet ripe. These signs, the miners thought, were instituted by God, to enable man to discover hid treasure.

Sciomancy, or the divination by shadows, was another class of harmless, but useless magic. The Chaldeans, says Paracelsus, when they were banished from a place, and wanted to bury their treasure, observed at what hour, minute, and day a shadow fell upon a certain statue or fountain, and then hid their gold beneath it, thus preserving a certain clue for its discovery.

There is something very vivid in the

All means of discovering the future by beryls, looking glasses, flight of birds, etc., Paracelsus utterly condemned, as contrary to God and nature's command. Visions he held to be doubtful, and often of devilish origin. All ceremonies and conjurations he considered forbidden by the Old Testament, and advised only prayer, faith, and watchfulness as the Christian's foundation of magic.

The signs of metals were the stars or coruscations which they gave out in the course of preparation.

Of some natural signatures now acknowledged, as, for instance, the circles in wood, which indicate its age, Paracelsus says nothing; but he mentions the horns of cattle, the teeth of horses, and the claws of birds, as corroborative of his doctrine; he mentions, also, the colors of clouds and the circles round the moon.

Not satisfied with all these sources of omens, Paracelsus believed in Pyromancy, or divination by fire; Hydromancy, or that by water; and Chaomancy, or divination by wind and air.

The first science was the observation of all sounds in the fire, of all visions of salamanders, and sight of falling stars, comets, and lightnings. It included all observations of will-o'-the-wisps, and corpse candles moving over new-made graves; all double suns and supernatural glimmerings.

The signs of hydromancy were inundations, floods, rains, storms, appearance of sea-monsters, tempests, agitation of water, and perturbation of waves.

Chaomancy showed its signs, to use the mystic language, by the stars of the air and wind. The Chaomantist drew his prophecies from shaken houses and trees uptorn; from broken boughs and scattered flowers. During whirlwinds it was supposed that spirits fell from the upper air and voices were heard; hobgoblins, household gods, and wood-spirits appeared; and the honey-dew, or manna, that fell on leaves, was even thought supernatural.

The necromantist not only invoked the dead, but foretold death. It was held a sign of dissolution if spirits were heard knocking, when purple spots came on the dead man's skin, or his hands turned to a

Alchemy was the old Chaldaic superstition that Diocletian in vain tried to put down by a persecution which acted upon it as shaving does upon hair, stimulating and not destroying it.

Perpetuated by the Arabs, it revived in the middle ages, becoming the passion of the sage, the wonder of the citizen, and the imposture of the needy. Our own Edward IV. encouraged it, and in Charles I.'s time it revived in a wonderful degree. While money is power, and there is a dark corner left in science, it will continue to be studied. My readers will scarcely believe that, not thirty years ago, an alchemist's lamp burnt day and night in the back room of a London editor. Alchemy and astrology have still their thousands of votaries, who yet believe with hope and enthusiasm what Boyle and Newton both believed in, and what Bacon did not doubt.

If

In old books, from Chaucer downwards, we find tales of itinerant cheats, in threadbare gowns, with bleared eyes and smoky hands, who pretended to have discovered the philosopher's stone, and were afraid to disclose their riches to the vulgar. they wormed into a convent, all the church plate went in experiments; if into a country house, they melted down every thing, to the knight's spurs and the wife's thimble, and skulked off some night, leaving nothing behind but some warped fire-irons and a heap of broken glasses. These men smelt of brimstone, had stained fingers, grimy faces, and affected great sanctity. All failures they accounted for by the absence of some one ingredient, the carelessness of the furnace watcher, or the brittleness of a crucible.

Sometimes a man on the brink of discovery, in a rage at some oversight, weuld leap up and smash his pots and glasses with any billet he could seize. The jargon was all mystical. They called one ingredient "the red man," and another "the white wife." "The chase of the green lion" was the name of one experiment; and alchemy they described as a palace with twelve gates, which were calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, sublimation, etc. Their ingredients were star-slime, and soot, and blood, and eggs,

The real philosopher was, it was supposed, obliged before he died to confess his secret to some favorite disciple; and many writers are said to have derived their learning from such sources. So fascinating was the passion of this pursuit that the golden fleece itself could not have been more eagerly sought.

The alchemist professed only to help nature, believing that all created things had a tendency to become gold but were checked by mixture with impurities. To remove these impurities was to restore a metal to gold. Many of the philosophers, including Paracelsus, disavowed the pursuit for the stone, preferring, as they declared or pretended, the elixir of life, which would be a blessing to mankind. A religious life they all deemed a necessary preparation for the long search. They declared it right to conceal from the world discoveries, which would only be abused by the rabble, and used a mystic language of blended Arabic and Hebrew.

Their theory is tolerably well defined by Ben Jonson, a deep reader on abstruse subjects, thus: All things, they thought, arose from the humid exhalation of earth, which is water, and unctuous, and a viscous residuum, which is earth alone, the refuse of creation. The more dryness and less moisture became stone; the more fatness, sulphur, and quicksilver, the mother of metals. From the fatness, sulphur, the present watery property of all things that melt with fire; and the airy and oily part, quicksilver. These two made metals, ductile, malleable, and extendable, and combining in the earth, were heavy, producing gold, which they believed grew like a tree, and shot out its branches through the earth.

On Paracelsus' arrival in Basle he instantly placarded door and wall with the following arrogant challenge, which produced him a host of enemies: men afraid of losing fortune and fame, and men conscientiously opposed to the new movement in medicine. Paracelsus, they heard, was a Swiss empiric, who used poisonous and unsafe drugs, and laughed at the works of Galen which were to them sacred. What was this stranger that he should dare to enter Basle to lecture men older and wiser than himself? Let him beware of his cup and dish, and of the bully's dagger. Horse-grin, hiss, or mock, out came the proclamation, and here it is, say on the cathedral door or on the market cross, surrounded by burghers in velvet gowns and gold chains, soldiers with two-handed swords and slashed mail, and sallow envenomed doctors twisting their eyes in colics of scorn and wrath:

"Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, a hermit, doctor, and professor of both medicines:"

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Whereas, of all disciplines, medicine only, as being a certain divine gift, is praised with the honorable title and name of necessity, by the testimony both of sacred writ and also of profane, we intend to purge and cleanse it from the dregs of barbarous and grievous errors, seeing that the number of doctors now successfully exercising it is so small. We do not bind ourselves to any precepts of the ancients but such as are evidently true, or such as we by our own labor and our long use and experience have made proof of. For who knows not but that erred, to the exceeding hazard of the sick, in most of the doctors of this age have grossly crates, Galen, and Avicen, just as if they had obstinately adhering to the sayings of Hippobeen so many tripods or oracles from which it was unlawful to depart a finger's breadth. These authors make us brave doctors but not physicians. For it is not title, nor eloquence, nor knowledge of tongues, nor reading of many that make the physician, but an excellent and books (though these things are ornaments,) deep knowledge of things and mysteries, which is worth all the rest.

do, for two hours space daily, public interpret with accurate diligence, my books both of active and inspective medicine, physic, and surgery,

to the great profit and advantage of hearers. This knowledge I have not begged of Galen or Hippocrates, but have obtained by those best instructors, labor and experience, for experiment and reason are my spokesmen.

"Wherefore, honest readers, if the mysteries of this Appolinean art are delightful to any of you, so that a love and desire for them possess you, and you covet thoroughly to learn in a short space of time whatever pertains to this discipline, come at once to us at Basle, and you shall find other and greater things than I can describe in these few lines. But, that my intention may appear more clearly to the studious, I am not ashamed to remind you that we do not at the least agree with the ancients in attributing all diseases to the complexions and humors, for that is an error which has prevented doctors from reaching the truth as to diseases and their judical days.

"Let these things, shown as through a lattice, suffice for to-day, but do not decide rashly till ye have heard Theophrastus. Fare ye well, and take in good part this our effort towards the

reformation of medicine.

"Dated at Basle in the nones of June,

MDXXVII."

In this regal proclamation, the wandering doctor at once openly set the ancients at defiance, and claimed a respect for experiment and experience beyond tradition. He was Luther in science, and his revolution went further than medicine. The men who despised Galen learned soon to despise Aristotle, and Pliny's fables began to be taken less for granted. Long before the Royal Society, Hervey had learnt, by rejection of dogma and inductive evidence, to discover one of the great wonders of the microcosm.

The doctor, cried Paracelsus from his pile of skeletons and his ring of furnaces, must SEE, and not merely read, what others have seen. Walking round a room does not lead to discovery of a new world. The ass-doctors, the egregious fellows, the liars, the evil men, he cried, may stay at home, and waste years. I delight to journey to and fro, to see what lies hid in the limbo of earth, and to produce medicines for my neighbors' benefit.

They had their purple gowns and gold chains, he his common doublet and homely fare; but he rejoiced in knowing that the "good alchemist must be such a one as the coals do not hurt, one who is not tired with the daily smoke." They were babblers, smooth talkers, insolent in their dogmatic knowledge, and disdaining chemistry, which is the pillar of medicine. coals were not more used by miners and smiths than by these chemists, the colliers, said Paracelsus, would soon starve.

If

The false doctors he compares with the real "cooks of Geber," the Spargirists. The first were idle and slothful, going in proud dresses of plush and velvet, displaying rings upon their fingers, wearing silver-hilted swords by their sides, and The last diligay gloves on their hands. gently followed their labors, sweating whole days and nights in their furnaces, spending no time out of the laboratory they loved. They wore leather garments with pouches for tools, and aprons wherewith to wipe their hands; their fingers were covered not with gold rings, but with coal dust, and clay, and dung; they were sooty as Vulcan's smiths, and did not pride themselves on clean, smooth faces, nor were their dry lips washed often red with wine; they did not distress the rich with babbling, nor extolled their medicines, knowing that fine words did not cure, and that the work should praise the doctor, not the doctor his work.

Such at least, is Paracelsus' opinion of his fellow-workers. Their enemies would have called them dupes or cheats, misera ble enthusiasts, forging lies, and generating ashes. Yet many of these enemies were themselves alchemists; and while they ridiculed the mineral medicines, did not condemn the search for the undiscoverable treasure.

Nor was it very safe, perhaps they thought, to touch a man endued with almost supernatural power, supposing he could not turn any metal into gold, or extend life to the patriarchal age.