Chambers's Papers for the People Volume 9-10 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALCHEMY AND THE ALCHEMISTS. IN the case of a purely modern science, like geology or statistics, there can be little dispute and no mystery about its origin and progress. It is analogous to the United States of America. Its history lies, first and last, under the eye of present daylight: hour after hour recorded by the press, that chronometer of recent ages. Such sciences as astrology and alchemy, on the other hand, ran their courses in the twilight of time, having taken rise in the starlit night of history. Resembling the nations of antiquity in these respects, they resemble them also in tracing their origin to giants, prophets, superhuman heroes, or demigods. This fabulous character of the early annals of those dark-age mysteries?for they were schemes of esoteric dogma rather than explicit fabrics of knowledge?is the first thing that attracts the attention of the historical student of alchemy. The very etymology of the word is lost in hopeless obscurity. Scaliger says he saw a work in the King of France's library, written in Greek, by Zozimus the Fanapolite, in the fifth century; and Olaus Borrichius seems to intimate that he also had read it, although it is in a somewhat ambiguous passage that the hint occurs. They represent it as "a faithful description of the sacred and divine art of making gold and silver." Borrichius gives what professes to be an extract from it, in which the writer first refers to a fact which he had managed to deduce from the Scriptures, Hermes Tris- megistus, and many other sources?namely, that there is a tribe of genii possessed of an unhappy propensity to fall in love with women. " The ancient and divine Scriptures inform us," he gravely assures the worthy Olaus, the learned Scaliger, and others his readers, " that the angels, captivated by women,...