mysterious medicament employed. Professor Franck thinks one of the strangers was Gautier Van Decoren, a physician of Flemish Holland.
SYNTHETIC REMEDIES.
Early Distinction between Inorganic and Organic
Chemistry.
The development of organic chemistry in the course of the nineteenth century is a subject so vast that it is mentioned in this place with something approaching despair. The great chemists who, in the latter part of the eighteenth and in the early years of the nineteenth century, had rescued their science from the superstitious and fantastic theories and conceits which had encumbered it, Lavoisier, Priestley, Scheele, Cavendish, Dalton, Fourcroy, Berzelius, and many others who might be named, distinguished sharply between the products of the mineral kingdom and those which they called organic, that is, substances of vegetable or animal origin, combined, it was agreed, under the influence of what was described as vital force. This force, it was considered, inherent in living bodies, could never be imitated in the laboratory, and its achievements were beyond human skill. It was even doubted whether the elements composing organic substances were subject to the same laws of combination as were those of the mineral world.
Lavoisier, it is true, regarded organic bodies as consisting of radical compounds, hydrocarbon radicals, as he called them, instead of the metallic bases. His last scientific work was the investigation of the statics of organic chemistry, and on this subject his clear vision
