J. B. VAN HELMONT.
In the year 1557, at Bois le Duc, in Brabant, John Baptist van Helmont was born of a noble family. He studied at Louvain, and became eminent in mathematics, algebra, the doctrines of Aristotle and Galen, and the medicine of Vopiscus and Plempius. At seventeen he lectured on physics as prælector, and took his degree of medical doctor in 1599. He read Hippocrates and the Greek and Arabian authors before he was twenty-two years old. He then passed ten years in the unsuccessful practice of physic, until he met a Paracelsian chemist, who discovered various chemical medicines to him. He retired thereupon to the castle of Vilvord, near Brussels, and laboured with unremitting diligence in the chemico-experimental analysis of bodies of every class. He passed his life in retirement, and was almost unknown to his neighbours, whom he, nevertheless, attended in illness, without accepting a fee. He declined an invitation and flattering offers from the Emperor and the Elector Palatine, and after writing several tracts, which even at this day are held in considerable estimation, he died in the sixty-seventh year of his age.
This author, so illustrious throughout Europe for his scientific knowledge, and no less celebrated for his noble rank than by the probity of his character, testifies in three different places that he has beheld, and himself performed, transmutation. In his treatise, De Vita Eterna, he declares himself as follows:—“I have seen and I have touched the philosophers’ stone more than once; the colour of it was like saffron in powder, but heavy and shining like pounded glass. I had once given me the fourth part of a grain—I call a grain that which takes six hundred to make an ounce. I made projection therewith, wrapped in paper, upon eight ounces of quicksilver, heated in a crucible, and immediately all the quicksilver, having made a little noise, stopped and congealed into a yellow mass. Having melted it in a strong fire, I found within eleven grains of eight ounces of most pure gold, so that a grain of this powder would have transmuted into very good gold, nineteen thousand one hundred and fifty-six grains of quicksilver.”
Had Helmont possessed the art of making the transmuting powder, his testimony might be open to suspicion. He says, on another occasion, that an adept, after a few days of acquaintance, presented him with half a grain of the powder of projection, with which he transmuted nine ounces of quicksilver into pure gold. He tells us further, that he many times performed a similar operation in the presence of a large company, and always with success. On these grounds he believed in the certainty and in the prodigious resources of the art, citing his acquaintance with an artist who had so much of the red stone as would make gold to the weight of two hundred thousand pounds.
Though ignorant of the nature of this powder of projection, Helmont professed the knowledge of the alcahest, and the methods of preparing medicines of transcendent efficacy by its means.
BUTLER.
In the reign of James the First the attention of the curious was attracted by a report of several transmutations performed in London by an artist of the above name. He was an Irish gentleman, who had recently returned from his travels. It was said that he was not himself acquainted with the secret of the stone, so far as regards its manufacture. To account for possessing it, the following story was related:—The ship in which he took passage during one of his voyages was captured by an African pirate, and on arriving in port he was sold as a slave to an Arabian, who was an alchemical philosopher. Butler, appearing to his master skilful and ingenious, was employed in most difficult operations in the laboratory. Having a perfect knowledge of the importance of the process, as soon as it was finished he bargained with an Irish merchant for his ransom, and made his escape, taking with him a large portion of the red powder.
The performers of public transmutations generally found it necessary to conceal their real knowledge by similar inventions. A physician, who was a countryman of Butler, however formed a plan for discovering his secret. He presented himself as a servant in search of a place, and was hired in that capacity by Butler. He found the philosopher so circumspect that he sought in vain for some circumstance to justify the public report of his treasures, until at last Butler sent him into the city to purchase a large quantity of lead and quicksilver.
The disguised doctor now hoped to make a discovery. He executed his commission with dispatch, and prepared a little hole in the wall of his master’s room, through which, from the adjoining apartment he could see what was going on. He soon perceived Butler taking something out of a box, which he put on the melted lead, and deposited the box in a concealed place under the floor of his room. At this moment the table and chair on which the doctor was elevated to the spy-hole, gave way, and he fell with a loud noise to the ground. Butler rushed out of his room to learn the cause of this disturbance, and perceiving the spy-hole, he with difficulty refrained from running his servant through the body with his sword.
Finding there was no hope of obtaining anything from Butler, the doctor expected to surprise his treasures by reporting to the officers of justice that he was a coiner of false money. A vigilant search was made according to his directions, but nothing was found, for Butler had already removed whatever could betray him—his furnace, crucibles, and eighty marks of gold were all he appeared to possess. He was therefore liberated from the prison in which he had been confined during the investigation.