ation of baser metals into
better." No gold, of course, was ever made; and next year the king,
doubting very much of the practicability of the thing, took further
advice, and appointed a commission of ten learned men and persons of
eminence to judge and certify to him whether the transmutation of metals
were a thing practicable or no. It does not appear whether the commission
ever made any report upon the subject.

In the succeeding reign an alchymist appeared who pretended to have
discovered the secret. This was George Ripley, the canon of Bridlington,
in Yorkshire. He studied for twenty years in the universities of Italy,
and was a great favourite with Pope Innocent VIII., who made him one of
his domestic chaplains, and master of the ceremonies in his household.
Returning to England in 1477, he dedicated to King Edward IV. his famous
work, _The Compound of Alchymy_; or, _the Twelve Gates leading to the
Discovery of the Philosopher's Stone_. These gates he described to be
calcination, solution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation,
cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and
projection; to which he might have added botheration, the most important
process of all. He was very rich, and allowed it to be believed that he
could make gold out of iron. Fuller, in his _Worthies of England_, says
that an English gentleman of good credit reported, that in his travels
abroad he saw a record in the island of Malta which declared that Ripley
gave yearly to the knights of that island, and of Rhodes, the enormous sum
of one hundred thousand pounds sterling to enable them to carry on the war
against the Turks. In his old age he became an anchorite near Boston, and
wrote twenty-five volumes upon the subject of alchymy, the most important
of which is the _Duodecim Portarum_ already mentioned. Before he died, he
seems to have acknowledged that he had mis-spent his life in this vain
study, and requested that all men, when they met with any of his books,
would burn them, or afford them no credit, as they had been written merely
from his opinion, and not from proof; and that subsequent trial had made
manifest to him that they were false and vain.[37]

[37] Fuller's _Worthies of England_.

BASIL VALENTINE.

Germany also produced many famous alchymists in the fifteenth century, the
chief of whom are Basil Valentine, Bernard of Treves, and the Abbot
Trithemius. Basil Valentine was born at Mayence