Lamotte; although, of whatever else he may have been guilty, he was perfectly innocent of this charge. After lying imprisoned in the Bastille for several months, he was tried by the French Parliament, pronounced innocent, and released. Immediately, however, the king banished him, and he left Paris for London, where he seems to have been persistently persecuted by agents of the French king. He returned to the Continent, ultimately reaching Italy, where he was arrested by the Inquisition and condemned to death on the charge of being a Freemason (a dire offence in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church). The sentence, however, was modified to one of perpetual imprisonment, and he was confined in the Castle of San Leo, where he died in 1795, after four years of imprisonment, in what manner is not known. CHAPTER VI THE AGE OF MODERN CHEMISTRY The Birth of Modern Chemistry. § =71.= Chemistry as distinct from Alchemy and Iatro-chemistry commenced with Robert Boyle (see plate 15), who first clearly recognised that its aim is neither the transmutation of the metals nor the preparation of medicines, but the observation and generalisation of a certain class of phenomena; who denied the validity of the alchemistic view of the constitution of matter, and enunciated the definition of an element which has since reigned supreme in Chemistry; and who enriched the science with observations of the utmost importance. Boyle, however, was a man whose ideas were in advance of his times, and intervening between the iatro-chemical period and the Age of Modern Chemistry proper came the period of the Phlogistic Theory--a theory which had a certain affinity with the ideas of the alchemists. [Illustration: PLATE 15. PORTRAIT OF ROBERT BOYLE. _To face page 94_]] The Phlogiston Theory.