s 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.

No