ve 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 a 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 legend