* * * * * Undoubtedly, there were the same venomous substances in and on this earth in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, as there are now: some few were known; but many more, and these the most sure and deadly, were not even dreamed of, _e.g._, strychnine, prussic acid, or the hideous bacilli, accessible as dust to any Twentieth Century medico who, on the sole condition that he is not instigated by criminal motives, with perfect security to himself can envenom and slay a street, a district, or a city. In the year 1164, Abd-el-Mumin-ben-Ali the Moorish King of Spain chased from his dominions all Jews and Christians who refused the faith of Islam. Among these, to Egypt went the celebrated Moses ben-Maimon. All that was known, he knew; and he knew sixteen venoms; litharge, verdigris, opium, arsenic, spurge or milk-wort, cashew-nut, hemlock, henbane, stramonium or thorn-apple, hemp, mandrake, venomous fungi, plantain, black-nightshade or felon-wort, belladonna, and cantharides. To these, were added in the Borgian Era four centuries later, the tri-sulphite of arsenic, orpiment, antimony, corrosive sublimate, aconite or wolfsbane or monkshood, and perhaps white hellebore, and black or Christmas-Rose; making two and twenty substances known to be venomous. Undoubtedly, much damage might be done with this arsenal of venoms: but only in the event of the existence of the will to use them, and of the knowledge of the method of their exhibition. Undoubtedly, there was the will. The fact that Madonna Caterina Sforza-Riario (author of a wonderful collection of recipes, domestic and medicinal, a good housewife as well as witch and warrior,) was said to have attempted the envenoming of the Pope’s Holiness, as described in Book II, speaks for the fact that venom was feared, and therefore likely to be used. Governments experimented with venoms: for what purpose, who can tell? M. Lamanshy published an interesting document dated 1432 which he found in the Venetian Secret Archives.[71] “Trial has been made, on three porcine animals, of certain venoms, found in the chancery, sent very long ago from Vicenza, which have been proved not to be good.” Undoubtedly, there was the will. Undoubtedly, also, there was not the ability. * * * * * Strange and paradoxical though it may seem to be, alchymical knowledge, alchymical art, was in a lower condition during the years succeeding the Renascence of Learning, than it had been in the Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, which had gone before. The Dark Ages were the ages of Simples. The Age of the Renascence was the age of Compounds. And, in those compounds, virtue was changed, or lost, by sublimation, by distillation, or annulled by heterogeneous admixture. The following will make this plain.