[639] Sprengel, in his “History of Medicine,” makes Van Helmont appear as if disgusted with the charlatanry and ignorant presumption of Paracelsus. “The works of this latter,” says Sprengel, “which he (Van Helmont) had attentively read, aroused in him the spirit of reformation; but they alone did not suffice for him, because his erudition and judgment were infinitely superior to those of that author, and he despised this made egoist, this ignorant and ridiculous vagabond, who often seemed to have fallen into insanity.” This assertion is perfectly false. We have the writings of Helmont himself to refute it. In the well-known dispute between two writers, Goclenius, a professor in Marburg, who supported the great efficacy of the sympathetic salve discovered by Paracelsus, for the cure of every wound, and Father Robert, a Jesuit, who condemned all these cures, as he attributed them to the Devil. Van Helmont undertook to settle the dispute. The reason he gave for interfering was that all such disputes “affected Paracelsus as their discoverer and himself as his disciple” (see “De Magnetica Vulner.,” and l. c., p. 705).
[640] Demokritus said that, as from nothing, nothing could be produced, so there was not anything that could ever be reduced to nothing.
[641] J. Le Conte: “Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces,” appendix.
[642] The date is incorrect; it should be 1784.
[643] Ecclesiastes i. 10.
[644] Ibid., i. 6.
[645] Ibid., i. 7.
[646] Siljeström: “Minnesfest öfver Berzelius,” p. 79.
[647] “Séance de l’Academie de Paris,” 13 Août, 1807.
[648] Mollien: “Voyage dans l’interieur de l’Afrique,” tome ii., p. 210.