Even Newton seems to have hankered after it when young.  Among his MSS. in Lord Portsmouth’s library at Hurstbourne are whole folios of astrologic calculations.  It went on till the end of the seventeenth century, and died out only when men had begun to test it, and all other occult sciences, by experience, and induction founded thereon.

Countless students busied themselves over the transmutation of metals.  As for magic, necromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other mancies—­there was then a whole literature about them.  And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in the magic powers of the poor wretches whom they tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor wretches themselves.

Everyone, almost, believed in magic.  Take two cases.  Read the story which Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, tells in his life (everyone should read it) of the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum at Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks back with the magician, jumping from roof to roof along the tiles of the houses.

And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has dug up in his researches.  A Church commissioner at Oxford, at the beginning of the Reformation, being unable to track an escaped heretic, “caused a figure to be made by an expert in astronomy;” by which it was discovered that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny coat and was making for the sea.  Conceive the respected head of your College—­or whoever he may be—­in case you slept out all night without leave, going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to London or to Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly to inform the Bishop of Ely of his meritorious exertions!

In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born.  The son of a Swiss physician, but of noble blood, Philip Aureolus Theophrastus was his Christian name, Bombast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word he turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus.  Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, which is still a famous place of pilgrimage, he was often called Eremita—­the hermit.  Erasmus, in a letter still extant, but suspected not to be genuine, addressed him by that name.

How he passed the first thirty-three years of his life it is hard to say.  He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of that day had in the Tyrol.