practically never found alone in nature.

Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are
associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact
that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly
designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses who,
working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable
humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There
are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the
first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry
from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information
to the uses of medicine. It was because of the study of Basil
Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic
traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, {61} and began our
modern pharmaceutics. Following on the heels of Paracelsus came Van
Helmont, the father of modern medical chemistry, and these three did
more than any others to enlarge the scope of medication and to make
observation rather than authority the most important criterion of
truth in medicine. Indeed, the work of these three men dominated
medicine, or at least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to
our own day, and their influence is still felt in drug-giving.

While we do not know the absolute date of either the birth or the
death of Basil Valentine and are not sure even of the exact period in
which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original
observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury
and sulphur and various salts, and above all, introduced antimony to
the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of
practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of
Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises
nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the
observational methods which he employed did give an immense amount of
knowledge and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which
the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or
three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but
then great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good
it may be. For a {62} time it came to be the most important drug in
medicine and was only replaced by venesection.

The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from