[D] Aphorismi Urbigerani.
[E] Commentary on the “Ancient War of the Knights.”
LIVES OF THE ALCHEMISTS.
GEBER.
The first, and, according to the general concensus of Hermetic authorities, the prince of those alchemical adepts who have appeared during the Christian era, was the famous Geber, Giaber, or Yeber, whose true name was Abou Moussah Djafar al Sofi, and who was a native of Haman, in Mesopotamia, according to the more probable opinion. He is also said to have been a Greek, a Spanish Arabian born at Seville, and a Persian of Thus. Romance represents him as an illuminated monarch of India. According to Aboulfeda, he flourished during the eighth century, but later and earlier periods have been also suggested. His life is involved in hopeless obscurity; but his experiments upon metals, undertaken with a view to the discovery of their constituent elements and the degrees of their fusibility, led him to numerous discoveries both in chemistry and in medicine, including suroxydised muriate of mercury, red oxyde of mercury, and nitric acid. “It is thus that Hermetic philosophy gave rise to chemistry,” says a writer in the Biographie Universelle, “and that the reputation of Geber is permanently established, not upon his search for an impossible chimera, but for his discovery of truths founded on actual experience.”
With the characteristic prodigality of the Middle Ages, no less than five hundred treatises have been attributed to the Arabian adept. They are supposed to have embraced the whole circle of the physical sciences, including astronomy and medicine. A few fragments, comparatively, alone remain of all these colossal achievements. Cardan included their author among the twelve most penetrating minds of the whole world, and Boerhave spoke of him with consideration and respect in his celebrated Institutiones Chemicæ. According to M. Hoefer, he deserves to be ranked first among the chemists and alchemists who flourished prior to Van Helmont. “He is the oracle of mediæval chemists, who frequently did nothing in their writings but literally reproduce their master. Geber for the history of chemistry is what Hippocrates is for the history of medicine.”
The name of Geber has been borne or assumed by several writers subsequent to the Hermetic adept; in this way the few extant facts concerning his life have been variously distorted, and books of later date and less value falsely ascribed to him. An astronomical commentary on the Syntaxis Magna of Ptolemy, in nine books, must be included in this number. It is a work of the twelfth century, as may be proved by internal evidence.
The extant works of Geber are, for the most part, in Latin, and are all open to more or less legitimate suspicion. In the library at Leyden there are said to be several Arabic manuscripts which have never been translated, and there is one in the Imperial Library at Paris, together with a Fragmentum de Triangulis Sphæricis which is still unprinted. The most complete edition of Geber is that of Dantzich, published in 1682, and reproduced in the Collection of Mangetus.[F] First in importance among the works of the Arabian adept must be ranked his “Sum of Perfection”—Summæ Perfectionis magisterii in suâ naturâ Libri IV. The next in value is the treatise entitled De Investigatione perfectionis Metallorum, with his Testament, and a tract on the construction of furnaces.
The “Sum of Perfection, or the Perfect Magistery,” claims to be a compilation from the works of the ancients, but with the doubtful exception of pseudo-Hermes, we are acquainted with no alchemical authors previous to the supposed period of Geber. A knowledge of natural principles is declared to be necessary to success in the art. The natural principles in the work of nature are a potent spirit, and a living or dry water. The disposition of the philosophical furnace and of the vas philosophorum is clearly described; the latter is a round glass vessel with a flat round bottom, and has several elaborate arrangements. A marginal note, however, declares that the account of it is hard to be understood. Among all the obscurities of the treatise, it is absolutely plain that it is concerned with metals and minerals. The properties of sulphur, mercury, arsenick, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, magnesia, lut, marchasite, are discussed in such a manner that it is impossible to establish an allegory, or to interpret the words of the writer in other than a physical sense.