their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients,
too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so
even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about
its working.

Some five years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, M.D., professor of
physiology in the University of Cambridge, England, was invited to
deliver the Lane lectures at the Cooper Medical College, in San
Francisco, he took for his subject "The History of Physiology." In the
course of his lecture on "The Rise of Chemical Physiology" he began
with the name of Basil Valentine, who first attracted men's attention
to the many chemical substances around them that might be used in the
treatment of disease, and said of him:--

He was one of the alchemists, but in addition to his inquiries into
the properties of metals and his search for the philosopher's stone,
he busied himself with the nature of drugs, vegetable and mineral,
and with their action as remedies for disease. He was no anatomist,
no physiologist, but rather what nowadays we should call a
pharmacologist. He did not care for the problem of the body, all he
sought to understand was how the constituents of the soil and of
plants might be treated so as to be available for healing the sick
and how they produced their effects. We apparently owe to him the
introduction of many chemical substances, for instance, of {63}
hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil of vitriol and salt,
and of many vegetable drugs. And he was apparently the author of
certain conceptions which, as we shall see, played an important part
in the development of chemistry and of physiology. To him, it seems,
we owe the idea of the three "elements," as they were and have been
called, replacing the old idea of the ancients of the four
elements--earth, air, fire, and water. It must be remembered,
however, that both in the ancient and in the new idea the word
"element" was not intended to mean that which it means to us now, a
fundamental unit of matter, but a general quality or property of
matter. The three elements of Valentine were (1) sulphur, or that
which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, or which at all
events disappears during burning or combustion; (2) mercury, that
which temporarily disappears during burning or combustion, which is
dissociated in the burning from the body burnt, but which may be
recovered, that is