Arabic manuscripts, for that race had a holy horror of all forms of Greek paganism, though it may be noted that their physicians made a superstition of the practice of bleeding on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only, unconscious perhaps of the origin of this ritual, which depended on the fact that Mars, the god of blood and iron, superintended Tuesday's operations, and Mercury, who had the management of the humours, was in charge on Wednesdays. It was really not until the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the European alchemists were trying to find a way to transmute the baser metals into gold, that the code became "conventionalised."
As already stated, the signs for the seven metals have not been invariable, but for many centuries they have been distributed thus:—
Sol, the Sun, Gold.
Luna, the Moon, Silver.
Jupiter, Tin.
Venus, Copper.
Mars, Iron.
Mercury, Quicksilver.
Saturn, Lead.
It may be noted in passing how these old-time fictions have influenced our language, our literature, and especially our medicine. Lunatic, jovial, saturnine, martial, venereal, and mercurial, are etymological reminiscences of the time when temperaments and diseases were associated with the heavenly bodies, and the extent to which metallic compounds acquired their medical reputations from their artificial relationship with the powers which were assumed to have adopted them, is curious. Nitrate of silver was given in brain disorders originally because of the belief in the control of the mental faculties by the moon. The
