sophical and religious side also
received consideration and care. I think, however, that such historical
knowledge was not at all necessary to enable us to gather their pious
views from the religious language of many masters of the hermetic art.
However, this naive childish logic was a closed book to the chemists who
made historical researches. They were hindered by their special knowledge.
It is far from my purpose to desire in the least to minimize the services
that a Chevreul or a Kopp has performed for the history of chemistry; what
I should like to draw attention to is merely that the honored fathers of
the history of chemistry saw only the lower--"inferius"--and not the
higher--"superius"--phase of alchemy, for example, in the Smaragdine tablet;
and that they used it as the type of universal judgment in such a way that
it needed a special faculty for discovery to reopen a fountain that had
been choked up.

I now realize that the poets have been more fortunate than the scientists.
Thus Wieland, who, for example, makes Theophron say in the Musarion (Book
II):

The beautiful alone
Can be the object of our love.
The greatest art is only to separate it from its tissue ...
For it [the soul] nothing mortal suffices,
Yea, the pleasure of the gods cannot diminish a thirst
That only the fountain quenches. So my friends
That which other mortals lures like a fly on the hook
To sweet destruction
Because of a lack of higher discriminative art
Becomes for the truly wise
A Pegasus to supramundane travel.

But the poets usually speak only in figures. I will therefore rest
satisfied with this one example.

The service of having rediscovered the intrinsic value of alchemy over and
above its chemical and physical phase, is to be ascribed probably to the
American, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who published his views on the alchemists
in the book, "Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists," that appeared in
Boston in 1857, and to the Frenchman, N. Landur, a writer on the
scientific periodical "L'Institut," who wrote in 1868 in similar vein [in
the organ "L'Institut," 1st Section, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 273 ff.], though I do
not know whether he wrote with knowledge of the American work. Landur's
observations are reported by Kopp (Alch., II, p. 192), but he does not
rightly value their worth. It need not be a reproach to him. He undertook
as a chemical specialist a work that would have r