gland in 1605, he received the degree of Doctor of Medicine
from the University of Oxford, and began to practise as a physician in
London.

He soon made himself conspicuous. He latinised his name from Robert Fludd
into Robertus a Fluctibus, and began the promulgation of many strange
doctrines. He avowed his belief in the philosopher's stone, the water of
life, and the universal alkahest; and maintained that there were but two
principles of all things,--which were, condensation, the boreal or
northern virtue; and rarefaction, the southern or austral virtue. A number
of demons, he said, ruled over the human frame, whom he arranged in their
places in a rhomboid. Every disease had its peculiar demon who produced
it, which demon could only be combated by the aid of the demon whose place
was directly opposite to his in the rhomboidal figure. Of his medical
notions we shall have further occasion to speak in another part of this
book, when we consider him in his character as one of the first founders
of the magnetic delusion, and its offshoot, animal magnetism, which has
created so much sensation in our own day.

As if the doctrines already mentioned were not wild enough, he joined the
Rosicrucians as soon as they began to make a sensation in Europe, and
succeeded in raising himself to high consideration among them. The
fraternity having been violently attacked by several German authors, and
among others by Libavius, Fludd volunteered a reply, and published, in
1616, his defence of the Rosicrucian philosophy, under the title of the
_Apologia compendiaria Fraternitatem de Rosea-cruce suspicionis et infamiae
maculis aspersam abluens_. This work immediately procured him great renown
upon the Continent, and he was henceforth looked upon as one of the
high-priests of the sect. Of so much importance was he considered, that
Keppler and Gassendi thought it necessary to refute him; and the latter
wrote a complete examination of his doctrine. Mersenne also, the friend of
Descartes, and who had defended that philosopher when accused of having
joined the Rosicrucians, attacked Dr. a Fluctibus, as he preferred to be
called, and shewed the absurdity of the brothers of the Rose-cross in
general, and of Dr. a Fluctibus in particular. Fluctibus wrote a long
reply, in which he called Mersenne an ignorant calumniator, and reiterated
that alchymy was a profitable science, and the Rosicrucians worthy to be
the regenerators of the world. This book w