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to observe. They will not be hurried or controlled; they gang their ain gate,' irrespectively of laboratory conditions; all that can be done is to study the modes, and measure the rate of their undeviable advance. A few buoyant speculators are, indeed, to be found who forecast the provision of means to regulate at will, and accelerate indefinitely, radio-active transformations. When they become available, the new alchemy will be a working concern, perhaps even a profitable branch of business. But for the present, Nature keeps the management of this particular department entirely in her own hands. Man looks on with hungry eyes, but his interference is barred out.

The history of alchemy is one long mystification. It deals largely with fictitious personages. Of others, who did really 'walk about the orb' in the close company of 'foolery,' it narrates the apocryphal adventures. Its leading authorities are mythical. Illustrious names are audaciously employed to lend some colour of authenticity to its mendacious annals. These form, indeed, a jungle of fraud and falsehood. What was true in them was often purposely obscured, since the arcana of the 'great art' were too sacred to be openly divulged. Its hierophants were veiled in shadow; its origin was indicated by dim traditions, transmitted by writers acquiescent and uncritical, if not uncandid.

M. Berthelot, in the work quoted at the head of this article, has done what was possible to elucidate the obscurity. His diligent labours have brought many confused facts and assertions into their proper sequence, so that we can now, at least, partially understand how the fanatics, knaves, and dupes of Gnostic Egypt came by their mysterious tenets. The superstitions and opinions they embodied proceeded from various sources, and primarily from Babylonia, the hotbed of occultism. The walls of Ecbatana, as described by Herodotus,* illustrate the connexion. They were sevenfold, and vario-tinted, the five outer circuits being embellished with the colours distinctive of the several planets, while the inner ramparts glittered in gold and silver to represent the sun and moon. Thus, the combined arrangement, like the seven-storied temple of Nebo at Borsippa, typified the majestic succession of the celestial spheres. Now the planets, no less than the sun and moon, claimed symbolical metals. Lead was appropriated to Saturn, tin to Jupiter, iron to Mars, copper to Venus, and quicksilver (after its full acquaintance was made) to Mercury. And the relationship was looked upon as intimate and real. Each metal was not only the client,

*Book I. cap. 98.

but, in a sense, the offspring of a fostering heavenly body. It grew in the bowels of the earth under its influence; it derived from it special affinities and magical properties; it incorporated the subsensual action of a celestial operative power. That the metals, then few and scarce, should be regarded with reverence is hardly to be wondered at. They were obtained with difficulty and brought from afar; they came forth from the fiercest ordeal by fire purified and vivified; they approved themselves in sundry ways as indispensable civilising agents.

The visionary metallurgy of Babylonia had its practical counterpart in Egypt. There the arts of smelting ore and of modifying and manipulating the products established their headquarters. Ptah of Memphis was a highly efficient divinity, far better skilled in his trade than the halting Olympian of the Iliad.' The word 'chemistry,' which probably perpetuates an old appellation for the Nile country, was defined by Suidas in the eleventh century as the art of making gold and silver; and the feasibility of such achievements was intimated by early experiments with a natural alloy. Asem (translated by the Greeks elektros, shining') figures prominently in the Egyptian records; it was produced artificially, held a high place in public estimation, and so late as the fifth century A.D. was still by Olympiodorus assigned to the planet Jupiter as his representative metal. Homer employed electrum in the decoration of the palace at Sparta,* the renowned owners of which-no others than Menelaus and Helen-having recently arrived from Egypt, had presumably brought in their train some Egyptian craftsmen. Hesiod made it the groundwork of the Shield of Hercules; and many of the objects excavated at Mycenæ and Hissarlik are composed of just the same kind of 'white gold' offered by Croesus to the Delphian Treasury. With the lapse of centuries, however, its vogue declined; the yellow gold of Osiris was preferred to the blanched metal sacred to Isis; and the planetary ties of electrum were finally severed when mercury, imported by the Carthaginians from the mines of Bætica, became available for its replacement.

It had, nevertheless, done its work. Its hybrid nature, its mixed qualities, the experienced practicability of endowing silver with some of the properties of gold, started the long tradition of alchemistic illusion and imposture. Nor was the case of electrum solitary. Many alloys were known which

*Elsewhere in the Odyssey, EKтpos certainly means amber; but a metallic substance is clearly indicated in the passage above referred to.

seemed indistinguishable from pure metals, and the graduated changes in their aspect and nature due to variations in their composition were explained on the crude transmutational theory. Technological practice, then, encouraged belief in the mutual convertibility of the 'strange and rare' substances secreted, as if through some dim vital process, by the earth under favour of the spheres. There appeared, for instance, to be no reason, on the face of things, why lead should not be ennobled into silver by the cleansing action of fire, even as electrum was refined into gold, and iron, strong and lustrous, was elicited from dull earthy matter.

The transcendental hopes of Egyptian artificers were further raised and stimulated by the vague speculations of Greek philosophers. Empedocles, vanishing amid the flames of Etna, left behind him the long-lived doctrine of the four elements, or 'roots of things.' The varieties of matter, in his view, depended upon the variety of their composition out of earth, water, air, and fire. Moreover, the proportions of these admixtures were not supposed to be determined inexorably, once for all. Expedients might be found for their arbitrary modification. But here a logical difficulty came in. The elements imparted quality, not substance. Opposed by their qualities, they could not be opposed in substance; * for substance is one, although qualities are many. And qualities, to exist, must be incorporated. Aristotle evaded the crux by inventing a fifth element to serve as a basis for the rest, and his 'quintessence' has, in more ways than one, obtained a kind of warrant from modern science. But the immediate importance of its introduction was that it availed to complete, and very satisfactorily to complete, the antique theory of matter. The hypothesis, in its finished shape, assumed a materia prima (potential matter,' in Verulam's phrase) of indeterminate character, an elusive, and barely conceivable essence, and gave it actuality by the addition, in suitable measure, of a crowd of differentiating properties-hardness, colour, weight, malleability, brittleness or toughness, and so on. The scheme is frankly metaphysical; it deals throughout with abstractions; there is scarcely a point at which it touches reality; yet it finds a sort of verification in the delicate experimental results secured at the Royal Institution and the Cavendish Laboratory. An Urstoff' is implied, nay, insisted upon by an array of well-ascertained facts. Sir William Crookes identified it, a quarter of a century ago, with the radiant matter' in

*M. Berthelot, 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' September 1, 1893, p. 322:

his vacuum-tubes. It escapes irresistibly from certain substances; imprisoned and bound in the fetters of some mysterious attraction, it constitutes all. In the free state it is matterif the name should be applied to it at all-reduced to the ranks, generalised, stript of its distinctions, the same from whatever source derived; it is matter in potency, rather than in act, intangible, inaccessible to sense-perception, probably indifferent to the solicitations of gravity. Critically considered, it is found to consist of countless swarms of electrons,' travelling with prodigious speed; and out of electrons, diversely aggregated, the chemical units or atoms of ordinary matter are apparently built up. Electrons may then fairly be regarded as the modern equivalent of the formless protyle' of Greek thinkers.

The dogmas of the fundamental unity of matter, and of the 'accidental' character of its sorts and species, evidently provided a rational justification for the toils of alchemists. But much more was needed to give their art the vigorous vitality, which enabled it, during twelve hundred years, to withstand the blasts and counterblasts of opinion. It lived and throve, not because of the truths which it misrepresented, but in virtue of the greed of gain which it encouraged, and the frauds, half visionary, half vulgar, by which its practice was sheltered and surrounded. Alchemy was from the first intertwined with the varied forms of occult belief which crept westward, through Alexandria, from the valley of the Euphrates in the early centuries of our era. Egypt in those days swarmed with Gnostics, and Gnosticism was in close alliance with every form of Oriental superstition. Pseudo-sciences, accordingly, developed, as in a forcing-house, under its influence, appropriating authority by the forgery of great names, and acquiring popularity through facile appeals to credulity and cupidity. Populus vult decipi; 'decipiatur,' will always be the mot d'ordre of demagogues and charlatans.

Hermes Trismegistus, reputed to be the first alchemistic author, was a fit eponym of the 'hermetic philosophy.' The books attributed to him were numerous, and highly cryptic; but they were held sacred, and from their dicta there was no appeal. His identity, in fact, merged into that of Thoth, the ibis-headed deity of Hermopolis, and the example of pseudonymous authorship set in his case was extensively followed to the bewilderment of posterity. The classics of alchemistic literature are, more often than not, apocryphal; their alleged authors are simulacra. Thus the Archpriest John, the successor of Hermes, seemed by his evasiveness to prefigure the slippery personality of his Abyssinian namesake. Democritus of Abdera,

who came next, although endowed, as a philosopher, with the full Cartesian certainty of his own existence, played a purely fictitious part in hermetic tradition. His supposed sayings proceeded from his mouth by a trick, so to speak, of ventriloquism. One of them, reported by Julius Firmicus, has a curious Baconian ring. The famous aphorism of the 'Novum Organum,' "Natura non nisi parendo vincitur,' was preluded by the (socalled) Democritean maxim, 'Natura aliâ a naturâ vincitur,' signifying that man can only indirectly control the operations of nature by providing opportunities for their working along the lines of his choice. Bacon's felicitous phrase thus happily rescued from oblivion a derelict sentence of illuminative import.

Democritus was said to have received instruction in the spagyric art from Ostanés the Mede, classed with Zoroaster by St. Augustine. Under the auspices of this mythical personage, and described by him in an imaginary treatise, the elixir vitæ made its entry on the scene. The association is memorable as indicating the Chaldean origin of the 'divine fluid' which became an integral part of every full-blown adept's stock-in-trade. Later on the fluid was defined to be 'potable gold'; and the obscure but persistent relationship between the transmutation of metals and the cure of human ills was primitively emphasised by the inclusion of the Egyptian Cnuphis, the healing 'soul of the 'world,' among leading lights of the art, under the alias of Agathodemon.

Early lists of goldmakers were compiled with small regard to probability. They comprise the names of Plato, Aristotle, Heracleitus, Porphyry, the Emperor Heraclius, and Cleopatra, the last entry being due to a confusion of designations between her of the bold black eyes' and a genuine artist of that name. Another female alchemist was the supposed inventor of the bain-marie, Mary the Jewess. Her co-religionists at Alexandria were strongly imbued with the mysticism of metallurgy; the related doctrines had an unmistakable Jewish complexion, and the Cabbala was pored over by their adherents no less attentively and devoutly than the works of Trismegistus himself.

The first historical report of an experiment in transmutation has been handed down by Pliny the Elder.* Caligula was the experimenter. Hoping to allay the gold-hunger which has not yet ceased to gnaw at the vitals of the sons of Adam, he built a furnace, and caused a quantity of orpiment to be calcined. The result did not come up to his expectations; king's yellow (trisulphide of arsenic), for all its deceptive glitter, did not prove to be

* M. Berthelot, 'Les Origines de l'Alchimie,' p: 69. VOL. CCV. NO. CCCCXIX.

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