sary to search into the Apocalypse to know
the signification of magic medicine. The man who blindly obeyed the will
of God, and who succeeded in identifying himself with the celestial
intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone--he could cure all
diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased; it being by
the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged
theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars--the sun governed the heart,
and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall,
Mercury the lungs, Mars the bile, and Venus the loins. In the stomach of
every human being there dwelt a demon, or intelligence, that was a sort of
alchymist in his way, and mixed, in their due proportions, in his
crucible, the various aliments that were sent into that grand laboratory,
the belly.[40] He was proud of the title of magician, and boasted that
he kept up a regular correspondence with Galen from hell; and that he
often summoned Avicenna from the same regions to dispute with him on the
false notions he had promulgated respecting alchymy, and especially
regarding potable gold and the elixir of life. He imagined that gold could
cure ossification of the heart, and, in fact, all diseases, if it were
gold which had been transmuted from an inferior metal by means of the
philosopher's stone, and if it were applied under certain conjunctions of
the planets. The mere list of the works in which he advances these frantic
imaginings, which he called a doctrine, would occupy several pages.

[40] See the article "Paracelsus," by the learned Renaudin, in the
_Biographie Universelle_.

GEORGE AGRICOLA.

This alchymist was born in the province of Misnia, in 1494. His real name
was _Bauer_, meaning a husbandman, which, in accordance with the common
fashion of his age, he latinised into Agricola. From his early youth, he
delighted in the visions of the hermetic science. Ere he was sixteen, he
longed for the great elixir which was to make him live for seven hundred
years, and for the stone which was to procure him wealth to cheer him in
his multiplicity of days. He published a small treatise upon the subject
at Cologne, in 1531, which obtained him the patronage of the celebrated
Maurice duke of Saxony. After practising for some years as a physician at
Joachimsthal, in Bohemia, he was employed by Maurice as superintendent of
the silver mines of Chemnitz. He led a happy life among th