[Footnote 4: Address cited]
[Footnote 5: For the refutation of this calumny with regard to John XXII, see "Pope John XXII and the supposed Bull forbidding Chemistry," by James J. Walsh, Ph. D., LL. D., in the Medical Library and Historical Journal, October, 1905.]
During the fourteenth century Arnold of Villanova, the inventor of nitric acid, and the two Hollanduses kept up the tradition of original investigation in chemistry. Altogether there are some dozen treatises from these three men on chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly did their work in a spirit of thoroughly frank, original investigation. They were more interested in minerals than in any other class of substances, but did not waste much time on the question of transmutation of metals. Professor Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edinburgh, said in his history of chemistry many years ago that the Hollanduses have very clear descriptions of their processes of treating minerals in investigating their composition, which serve to show that their knowledge was by no means entirely theoretical or acquired only from books or by argumentation.
Before the end of this fourteenth century, according to the best authorities on this subject, Basil Valentine, the more particular subject of our essay, was born.
Valentine's career is a typical example of the personally obscure but intellectually brilliant lives [{56}] which these old monks lived. It seems probable, according to the best authorities, as we have said, that his work began shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century, although most of what was important in it was accomplished during the second half. It would not be so surprising, as most people who have been brought up to consider the period just before the Reformation in Germany as wanting in progressive scholars might imagine, for a supremely great original investigator to have existed in North Germany about this time. After all, before the end of the century, Copernicus, the Pole, working in northern Germany, had announced his theory that the earth was not the center of the universe, and had set forth all that this announcement meant. To a bishop-friend who said to him, "But this means that you are giving us a new universe," he replied that the universe was already there, but his theory would lead men to recognize its existence. In southern Germany, Thomas à Kempis, who died in 1471, had traced for man the outlines of another universe, that of his own soul, from its mystically practical side. These great Germans were only the worthy contemporaries of many other German scholars scarcely less distinguished than these supreme geniuses. The second half of the fifteenth century, the beginning of the Renaissance in Germany as well as Italy, is that wonderful time in history when somehow men's eyes were opened to see farther and their minds broadened to gather in more of the truth of [{57}] man's relation to the universe, than had ever before been the case in all the centuries of human existence, or than has ever been possible even in these more modern centuries, though supposedly we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time.
Coming as he did before printing, when the spirit of tradition was even more rife and dominating than it has been since, it is almost needless to say that there are many curious legends associated with the name of Basil Valentine. Two centuries before his time, Roger Bacon, doing his work in England, had succeeded in attracting so much attention even from the common people, because of his wonderful scientific discoveries, that his name became a by-word and many strange magical feats were attributed to him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard even in the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number of the same sort of myths attached themselves to the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth century. He was proclaimed in popular story to have been a wonderful magician. Even his manuscript, it was said, had not been published directly, but had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached to the monastery and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too, like Roger Bacon, was a product of the [{58}] thirteenth century. It seems reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his works enable the historian of science to place him within a half century of the discovery of America.
One of the stories told with regard to Basil Valentine, because it has become a commonplace in philology, has made him more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use a quarter of a century ago, in the chapter on Antimony, there was a story that I suppose students never forgot. It was said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day, where the swine of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up together with some other refuse. He watched the effect upon the swine very carefully, and found that, after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine developed an enormous appetite and became fatter than any of the others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to good purpose even on the members of the community.
Now, some of the monks in the monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, [{59}] and he thought that the putting on of a little fat in their case might be a good thing. Accordingly he administered, surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however, was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to one, though less authentic, version of the story, some of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, even perished as the result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the better version they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had discovered antimony, that is, opposed to monks. It might be good for hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were. [Footnote 6]
[Footnote 6: It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on which some of these old stories that must now be rejected, are founded. I have come upon the story with regard to Basil Valentine and the antimony and the monks in an old French medical encyclopedia of biography, published in the seventeenth century, and at that time there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. How much older than this it may be I do not know, though it is probable that it comes from the sixteenth century, when the kakoethes scribendi attacked many people because of the facility of printing, and when most of the good stories that have so worried the modern dry-as-dust historian in his researches for their correction became a part of the body of supposed historical tradition.]
Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from anti and monachus than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in nature.