over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working
hypothesis. The doctrine of "matter and form," taught for so many
centuries by the scholastic philosophers, which proclaimed that all
matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material substratum,
and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more acknowledged
verisimilitude, or lies at least closer to the generally accepted ideas
of the most progressive scientists, than it has at any time for the last
two or three centuries. Not only the great physicists, but also the
great chemists, are speculating along lines that suggest the existence
of but one form of matter, modified according to the energies that it
possesses under a varying physical and chemical environment. This is,
after all, only a restatement in modern times of the teaching of St.
Thomas of Aquin, in the thirteenth century.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of
interest in the lives of some of the men, who, dominated by some of the
earlier scholastic ideas, by the tradition of the possibility of finding
the philosopher's stone, which would transmute the baser metals into the
precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any
modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most
interesting of these--indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest
of the alchemists--is the man whose only name that we know is that which
appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of
the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best
historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine
may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it
among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a
monk, however, there seems to be no room for doubt, for his writings
give abundant evidence of it, and, besides, in printed form they began
to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their
being attributed to a monastic source, unless an indubitable tradition
connected them with some monastery.

This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have) did so much for
the science of the composition of substances that he eminently deserves
the designation that has been given him of the last of the alchemists
and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal