According to Boerhaave, the first author who mentions al-chemia is Julius Firmicus Maternus, who lived under Constantine the Great, and who, in his Mathesis, c. 15, speaking of the influences of the heavenly bodies, affirms “that, if the moon be in the house of Saturn when a child is born, he shall be skilled in alchemy.”
The first writer who mentions the possibility of transmuting metals would appear to be a Greek divine called Æneas Garæus, who lived towards the close of the fifth century, and who wrote a commentary on Theophrastus. He was followed by Anastatius the Sinaite, Syncellus, Stephanus, Olimpiodorus; and, says Boerhaave, “a crowd of no less than fifty more, all Greeks, and most or all of them monks.” “The art seemed now confined to the Greeks, and among them few wrote but the religious, who from their great laziness and solitary way of life were led into vain, enthusiastical speculations, to the great disservice and adulteration of the art. . . They all wrote in the natural style of the Schoolmen, full of jargon, grimace, and obscurity.”
Experimental alchemy, as distinguished from industrial chemistry, may, as already stated, be said to have originated with the Arabians. At first, alchemy was regarded as a branch of the art of healing, and its professors were invariably physicians who occupied themselves with the
