SOURCE: "A Conjuror and a Quack of the Olden Time," in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Vol. 20, No. 517, November 26, 1853, pp. 340-42.

In the excerpt below, the anonymous writer considers Agrippa an example of a scientist more interested in wealth and self-promotion than in new discoveries.

In these days of wonder-working and new lights, it may not be amiss to turn our observation to the lights and wonders which awed and astonished our ancestors. The search after the elixir vitae and the philosopher's stone was a dignified and difficult life employment, to say the least of it; and the great alchymists should not be despised or forgotten by electro-biologists, magnetisers, and table-movers. The great physical philosophers of our own time have not been backward in acknowledging the obligations of science to those men of a by-gone age….

[Our] present task is to show how some among them—men of fame and...