FOOTNOTES:
[F] J. J. Mangeti, “Bib. Chem. Curiosa,” 2 v. fol. 1702.
RHASIS.
Rhazes, or Rasi, whose true name was Mohammed-Ebn-Secharjah Aboubekr Arrasi, was a celebrated Arabian physician and chemist, who was born about the year 850 at Ray in Irâk, upon the frontiers of Khorassan. In his youth he was passionately devoted to music and to frivolous amusements; he did not begin the study of medicine till he was thirty years of age, but he soon surpassed, both in skill and in knowledge, all the physicians of his time. He devoted himself with equal zeal to philosophy, is said to have journeyed into Syria, Egypt, and even into Spain, and successively took charge of the famous hospital at Bagdad, and of another in his native town. He was naturally good and generous, and he devoted himself to the service of the poor. His oriental panegyrists call him the Imam among the scholars of his time, and western writers describe him as the Galen of the Arabians. By his assiduous attention to the multitudinous varieties of disease he obtained the appellation of the experimenter, or the experienced. No less than two hundred and twenty-six treatises are said to have been composed by him. To some of these Avicenna was largely indebted, and even in Europe he exercised considerable influence, for his writings on medicine were the basis of university teaching up to the seventeenth century.
Of the twelve books of chemistry which have been attributed to Rhasis several are probably spurious, and few have been printed. He was an avowed believer in the transmutation of metals, and, having composed a treatise on the subject, he presented it in person to Emir Almansour, Prince of Khorassan, who was highly delighted, and ordered one thousand pieces of gold to be paid to the author as a recompense. However, he desired to witness the marvellous experiments and the prolific auriferous results with which the work abounded. Rhasis replied that he might certainly be gratified in his sublime curiosity if he provided the necessary instruments and materials for the accomplishment of the magnum opus. The Emir consented; neither pains nor expenses were spared over the preliminary preparations, but when the time came the adept failed miserably in his performance, and was severely belaboured about the head by the enraged potentate with the unprofitable alchemical treatise. Rhasis was old at the time, and this violence is by some declared to have been the cause of his subsequent blindness. He died in poverty and obscurity, a point which is not supposed to disprove his possession of the powerful metallic medicine. The date of his death is uncertain, but it was probably in the year 932.
The writings of Rhasis, like those of Geber, enlarge on the planetary correspondences, or on the influence exerted by the stars in the formation of metallic substances beneath the surface of the earth. The explicit nature of the recipes which he gives may be judged by such directions as Recipe aliquid ignotum, quantum volueris. It is to him, nevertheless, that we owe the preparation of brandy and several pharmaceutic applications of alcohol. He was the first to mention orpiment, realgar, borax, certain combinations of sulphur, iron, and copper, certain salts of mercury indirectly obtained, and some compounds of arsenic.[G] He was also a zealous promoter of experimental methods.
FOOTNOTES:
[G] Figuier, L’Alchimie et les Alchimistes, pp. 95, 96.