Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 1).djvu/409

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

injured by the result. Anthony made a handsome fortune out of it and continued to sell it largely until his death in 1623, and according to the authority already quoted, his son John Anthony, who qualified as an M.D. and held the licence of the College, derived a considerable income from the sale of the remedy. Dr. Munk, however, in the "Roll of the College of Physicians" intimates that this gentleman was free from the hereditary stain. "He succeeded to the more reputable part of his father's practice," is the pleasant way in which Dr. Munk describes John Anthony, M.D. John, however, wrote the following epitaph on his father:

Though poisonous Envy ever sought to blame
Or hide the fruits of thy Intention;
Yet shall all they commend that high design
Of purest gold to make a Medicine
That feel thy Help by that thy rare Invention.

Glauber (1650) expounds "the true method of making Aurum Potabile," knowledge of which, he says, was bestowed on him from the highest. "Haply there will be some," he remarks at the beginning of his treatise on this subject, who will deny "that gold is the Son of the Sun, or a metallic body, fixed and perfect, proceeding from the rays of the Sun; asking how the Solary immaterial rays can be made material and corporeal?" But this only shows how ignorant they are of the generation of metals and minerals. Disposing of such incredulity by a few comments, and referring the sceptics to his treatise De Generatione Metallorum, he deals with several other irrelevant matters, and at last describes his process in prolix and unintelligible terms.

" of living gold one part, and three parts of quick mercury, not of the vulgar, but the philosophical every-