it is humid; the mixture is therefore dry in the first degree. If the total had shown twelve of the dry to three of the humid qualities, it would have been dry in the second degree. When it is remembered that in addition to these calculations the physician had to realise that drugs adapted for one part of the body might be of no use for another, it will be perceived that the art of prescribing was a serious business under the sway of the old dogmas.
The Rosicrucians.
It has never been pretended, so far as I am aware, that the Rosicrucian mystics of the middle ages did anything for the advancement of pharmacy. They are only mentioned here because they claimed the power of curing disease, and also because it happens that the fiction which created the legends concerning them was almost contemporaneous with the not unsimilar one (if the latter be a fiction) which made a historical figure of Basil Valentine. Between 1614 and 1616 three works were published professing to reveal the history of the brethren of the Rosy Cross. The first was known as Fama Fraternitatis, the second was the Confessio Fraternitatis, and the third and most important was the "Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz." The treatises are written in a mystic jargon, and have been interpreted as alchemical or religious parables, though vast numbers of learned men adopted the records as statements of facts. It was asserted that Christian Rosencreutz, a German, born in 1378, had travelled in the East, and from the wise men of Arabia and other countries had learnt the secrets of their knowledge, religious, necromantic, and alchemical. On his return
