literature.  Withington quotes a good example in a description by Pitcairne, the Scot who was professor of medicine at Leyden at the end of the seventeenth century.  “Life is the circulation of the blood.  Health is its free and painless circulation.  Disease is an abnormal motion of the blood, either general or local.  Like the English school generally, he is far more exclusively mechanical than are the Italians, and will hear nothing of ferments or acids, even in digestion.  This, he declares, is a purely mechanical process due to heat and pressure, the wonderful effects of which may be seen in Papin’s recently invented ‘digester.’  That the stomach is fully able to comminute the food may be proved by the following calculation.  Borelli estimates the power of the flexors of the thumb at 3720 pounds, their average weight being 122 grains.  Now, the average weight of the stomach is eight ounces, therefore it can develop a force of 117,088 pounds, and this may be further assisted by the diaphragm and abdominal muscles the power of which, estimated in the same way, equals 461,219 pounds!  Well may Pitcairne add that this force is not inferior to that of any millstone."(36) Paracelsus gave an extraordinary stimulus to the study of chemistry and more than anyone else he put the old alchemy on modern lines.  I have already quoted his sane remark that its chief service is in seeking remedies.  But there is another side to this question.  If, as seems fairly certain, the Basil Valentine whose writings were supposed to have inspired Paracelsus was a hoax and his works were made up in great part from the writings of Paracelsus, then to our medical Luther, and not to the mythical Benedictine monk, must be attributed a great revival in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, for the Elixir of Life, for a universal medicine, for the perpetuum mobile and for an aurum potabile.(37) I reproduce, almost at random, a page from the fifth and last part of the last will and testament of Basil Valentine (London, 1657), from which you may judge the chemical spirit of the time.

     (36) Withington:  Medical History from the Earliest Times,
     London, 1891, Scientific Press, p. 317.

     (37) See Professor Stillman on the Basil Valentine hoax, Popular
     Science Monthly, New York, 1919, LXXXI, 591-600.

Out of the mystic doctrines of Paracelsus arose the famous “Brothers of the Rosy Cross.”  “The brotherhood was possessed of the deepest knowledge and science, the transmutation of metals, the perpetuum mobile and the universal medicine were among their secrets; they were free from sickness and suffering during their lifetime, though subject finally to death."(38)

     (38) Ferguson:  Bibliotheca Chemica, Vol.  II, p. 290.  For an
     account of Fludd and the English Rosicrucians see Craven’s Life
     of Fludd, Kirkwall, 1902.