Not much is known of his history except what he himself wrote or what was related of him by his contemporaries. According to his own account he took to chemistry when as a young man he got cured of a troublesome stomach complaint by drinking some mineral waters. Eager to discover what was the essential chemical in those waters to which he owed his health he set to work on his experiments. The result was the discovery of sulphate of soda, which he called “Sal mirabile,” but which all subsequent generations have known as Glauber’s Salts. This, it happens, was the one of his discoveries of which he was not particularly vain, for he supposed that he had only obtained from another source Paracelsus’s sal enixon, which was in fact sulphate of potash. His own account of this discovery is necessarily of pharmaceutical interest. He gives it in his work _De Natura Salium_, as follows:-- In the course of my youthful travels I was attacked at Vienna with a violent fever known there as the Hungarian disease, to which strangers are especially liable. My enfeebled stomach rejected all food. On the advice of several friends I dragged myself to a certain spring situated about a league from Newstadt. I had brought with me a loaf of bread, but with no hope of being able to eat it. Arrived at the spring I took the loaf from my pocket and made a hole in it so that I could use it as a cup. As I drank the water my appetite returned, and I ended by eating the improvised cup in its turn. I made several visits to the spring and was soon miraculously cured of my illness. I asked what was the nature of the water and was told it was “salpeter-wasser.” Glauber was twenty-one at that time, and knew nothing of chemistry. Later he analysed the water and got from it, after evaporation, long crystals, which, he says, a superficial observer might confuse with saltpetre; but he soon satisfied himself that it was something quite different. Subsequently he obtained an identical salt from the residue in his retort after distilling marine salt and vitriol to obtain spirit of salt. As already stated, he believed he had produced the “sal enixon” of Paracelsus. But in memory of the benefit he had himself experienced from its use he gave it the title of “sal mirabile.” [Illustration: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the sign of “Glauber’s Head” appears to have been used in this country by some chemical manufacturers. The picture annexed is from one of these signs which was used more than a hundred years ago by Slinger and Son, of York, and is now in the possession of Messrs. Raimes and Co., of that city, who have kindly given me a photograph of it. It is a wooden bust which was once gilded, and presumably presents the traditional likeness of the famous German chemist. ]