his processes were so well devised that they have hardly been altered from his day to ours.
Not much is known of his history except what he himself wrote or what was related of him by his contemporaries. According to his own account he took to chemistry when as a young man he got cured of a troublesome stomach complaint by drinking some mineral waters. Eager to discover what was the essential chemical in those waters to which he owed his health he set to work on his experiments. The result was the discovery of sulphate of soda, which he called "Sal admirabile," but which all subsequent generations have known as Glauber's Salts. This, it happens, was the one of his discoveries of which he was not particularly vain, for he supposed that he had only obtained from another source Paracelsus's sal enixon, which was in fact sulphate of potash. His own account of this discovery is necessarily of pharmaceutical interest. He gives it in his work De Natura Salium, as follows:—
In the course of my youthful travels I was attacked at Vienna
with a violent fever known there as the Hungarian disease, to
which strangers are especially liable. My enfeebled stomach rejected
all food. On the advice of several friends I dragged myself
to a certain spring situated about a league from Newstadt. I had
brought with me a loaf of bread, but with no hope of being able to
eat it. Arrived at the spring I took the loaf from my pocket and
made a hole in it so that I could use it as a cup. As I drank the
water my appetite returned, and I ended by eating the improvised
cup in its turn. I made several visits to the spring and was soon
miraculously cured of my illness. I asked what was the nature of
the water and was told it was "salpeter-wasser."
Glauber was twenty-one at that time, and knew
nothing of chemistry. Later he analysed the water and
got from it, after evaporation, long crystals, which, he
says, a superficial observer might confuse with saltpetre;
but he soon satisfied himself that it was something
