true etymology of the word chemic is logical, and had therefore no charms for the psychological spirit of the age. Later on, when men began to reflect that the ancient name for Egypt was Cham or Chemia, because, according to Plutarch, its soil was black like the pupil of the eye (χημεία τοῡ ὀφθάλμου), it flattered the chemists to call chemistry "the art of the ancient Chemi." Hence from a false derivation the art received a fresh impulse.
The discovery of the principal manuscripts of the sacred art we owe to the labour of M. Ferdinand Hoefer. We can take no safer guide than the judicious and profound author of the History of Chemistry in investigating the delusions into which a master of the sacred art was most likely to fall.
"Let us forget for an instant the advances which this science has made since the 5th century. Let us fancy ourselves for a moment transported to the laboratory of one of the great masters of the sacred art, and watch as neophytes some of his operations. 1st Experiment.—Some common water is heated in an open vessel. The water boils and changes to an aeriform body (steam), leaving at the bottom of the vessel a white earth in the form of powder. Conclusion—water changes into air and earth. What objection could we make to this inference, if we were wholly ignorant of the substances which water holds in solution, and which are, after evaporation, deposited at the bottom of the vessel? 2d Experiment.—A piece of red-hot iron is put under a bell which rests in a basin full of water. The water diminishes in volume, and a candle being introduced into the bell sets fire at once to the gas inside. Conclusion—water changes into fire. Is not this the natural conclusion which would present itself to any one who was ignorant that water is a composite body, consisting of two gases, one of which, oxygen, is absorbed by the iron, while the other, hydrogen, is ignited by contact with the flame? 3d Experiment.—A piece of lead, or any other metal except gold or silver, is burned (calcined) in contact with the air. It immediately loses its primitive properties, and is transformed into a powder or species of ashes or lime. The ashes, which are the product of the death of the metal, are again taken and heated in a crucible together with some grains of wheat, and the metal is seen rising from its ashes and reassuming its original form and properties. Conclusion—metals are destroyed by fire and revivified by wheat and heat. No objection could be raised against this inference, for the reduction of oxides by means of carbon, such as wheat, was as little known as the phenomenon of the oxidation of metals. It was from this power of resuscitating and reviving dead, i.e., calcined metals, that grains of wheat were made the symbol of the resurrection and life eternal. 4th Experiment.—Argentiferous lead is burned in cupels composed of ashes or pulverised bones, the lead disappears, and at the end of the operation there remains in the cupel a nugget of pure silver. Nothing was more natural than to conclude that the lead was transformed into silver; and to build on this and analogous facts, the theory of the transmutation of metals, a theory which, later on, led to the search for the philosopher's stone. 5th Experiment.—A strong acid is poured on copper, the metal is acted upon, and in process of time disappears, or rather is transformed into a green transparent liquid. Then a thin plate of iron is plunged into this liquid, and the copper is seen to reappear in its ordinary aspect, while the iron in its turn is dissolved. What more natural than to conclude that iron is transformed into copper? If instead of the solution of copper, a solution of lead, silver, or gold had been employed, they would have held that iron was transformed into lead, silver, or gold. 6th Experiment.—Mercury is poured in a gentle shower on melted sulphur, and a substance is produced as black as a raven's wing. This substance, when warmed in a closed vessel, is volatilised without changing, and assumes a brilliant red colour. Must not this curious phenomenon, which even science in the present day is unable to explain, have struck with amazement the worshippers of the sacred art, the more as in their eyes black and red were nothing less than the symbols of light and darkness, the good and evil principles, and that the union of these two principles represented in the moral order of things their God-universe. 7th and last Experiment.—Organic substances are heated in a still, and from the liquids which are removed by distillation and the essences which escape, there remains a solid residuum. Was it not likely that results such as these would go far to establish the theory which made earth, air, fire, and water the four elements of the world?"
But neither M. F. Hoefer's explanation of the appearances which the first master of the sacred art mistook for fact, nor the metaphysical theory of Nemesius, will enable us to understand how Zosimus the Theban, in the very infancy of the art, succeeded in discovering in sulphuric acid a solvent of metals; in assigning to mercury (which he called "holy water") its proper function, a function which succeeding generations of alchemists so monstrously exaggerated; and finally in disengaging from the red oxide of mercury oxygen gas, that Proteus which so often eluded the grasp of the alchemists, till at last it was held fast by the subtle analysis of Lavoisier. For we must remember that solid metals were considered as living bodies, and gases as souls which they allowed to escape. Of all the ingenious inventions of the Jewess Maria for regulating fusions and distillations, the only one that has survived is the Balneum Mariæ. The principle it depends on, viz., that the calcination of violent heat is less powerful as a solvent or component than the liquefaction produced by gentle heat, was afterwards reasserted by the Arabian Geber, and advocated by Francis Bacon. M. Hoefer imagines that Maria the Jewess discovered hydrochloric acid, the formidable rival of sulphuric acid. Succeeding writers on the history of chemistry have remarked that the band ages of Egyptian mummies were not more numerous than the mysteries of the sacred art, and the injunctions not to divulge its secrets, "under pain of the peach tree," or, to translate into modern English the language of an ancient papyrus, under pain of being poisoned by prussic acid. We should be wrong in thinking that all these allegories had no meaning for the initiated, and that this mystical tendency of the sacred art arrested its growth at starting. Rather the truth is, that these myths, which at a later stage prevented the free development of alchemy, at first served to stimulate its nascent powers.
Modern critics have pronounced some traditional sayings of Hermes Trismegistus to be apocryphal, but they have not given sufficient weight to the remarkable circumstance that it is precisely because these sayings are a medley of the cabalistic, gnostic, and Greek ideas with which Alexandria was then seething, that the seven golden chapters, the Emerald Table, and the Pimander obtained their authority—an authority they would never have possessed had they been only a translation of some obscure Egyptian treatise. No Egyptian priest could have written a sentence like that we find so often quoted as an axiom by subsequent alchemists: "Natura naturam superat; deinde verò natura naturæ congaudet; tandem natura naturam continet." Plato adds (not the disciple of Socrates, but a pseudo-Plato in the famous collection called Turba Philosophorum)—"continens autem omnia terra est." For, translated into modern language, this means that there may indeed be in this universe things which pass our intellectual ken; but that all that exists, all that is produced by the strife and changes of the elements, all, in a word, that appears to us supernatural, is really natural. That this is his meaning we may gather from the singularly bold comment which Plato himself adds, and which we may thus translate "Everything, even heaven and hell, are of this earth." It is true that the alchemists failed to draw any very definite conclusions from this fundamental axiom. But if we consider it carefully, we shall see that this earliest doctrine of the sacred art, which was now rapidly passing into alchemy, by thus excluding the supernatural, was making a great advance in the direction of positive science. This early advance was, however, counterbalanced by an early error (which itself arose from a noble ambition), viz., that art is as powerful as nature. The Emerald Table begins with a sentence no less celebrated than that quoted above:—"This is true, and far distant from a lie; whatsoever is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below. By this are acquired and perfected the miracles of the one thing." To understand the importance of this emphatic and categorical exordium, we must forget the sharp distinction we now draw between
