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 terms 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 the earlier
scholastic ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of finding
the philosopher's stone, which would {48} 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 there seems to be no doubt, for
his writings in manuscript and printed form began to have their vogue
at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed
to a monk unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some
monastery.

This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have), as we can
judge very well from his writings, eminently deserves the designation
of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is
practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves
also the title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only because of the
value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because
of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain {49} scientific
geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life.