Towards the close of the last century, Dr. James Price, a medical practitioner in the neighbourhood of Guildford, Surrey, acquired some notoriety by an alleged discovery of methods of transmuting mercury into gold or silver. He had been a student of Oriel College, Oxford, where he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Physic. In 1782 he published an account of his experiments on mercury, silver, and gold, performed at Guildford, in that year, before Lord King and others, to whom he appealed as eye-witnesses of his wonder-working power. It seems that mercury being put into a crucible, and heated in the fire with other ingredients (which had been shown to contain no gold), he added a red powder; the crucible was again heated, and being suffered to cool, amongst its contents, on examination, was found a globule of pure gold. By a similar process with a white powder, he produced a globule of silver. The character of the witnesses of these manifestations gave credit and celebrity for a time to Price, who was honoured by the University with the degree of Doctor of Physic, and he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr. Price had now placed himself in a perilous position; for persons acquainted with the history of alchemy must have conjectured how the gold and silver in his experiments might have been procured with any transmutation of mercury or any other substance. The Royal Society authoritatively required that the pretensions of the new associate should be properly sifted, and his claim as a discoverer be clearly established, or his character as an impostor exposed. A repetition of the doctor's experiments before a committee of the Royal Society was commanded on pain of expulsion; when the unfortunate man, rather than submit to the ordeal, took a draught of laurel-water, and died on July 31, 1783, in his twenty-fifth year. At the beginning of the present century, some persons of eminence in science thought favourably of alchemy. Professor Robinson, writing to James Watt, February 11, 1800, says, "The analysis of alkalies and alkaline earth will presently lead, I think, to a doctrine of _a reciprocal convertibility of all things into all ... and I expect to see alchemy revive_, and be as universally studied as ever." Sir Walter Scott, in his well-known paper on Astrology and Alchemy, in _The Quarterly Review_, tells us that about the year 1801, an adept lived, or rather starved, in the metropolis, in the person of the editor of an evening newspaper, who expected to compound the alkahat, if he could only keep his materials digested in his lamp-furnace for the space of seven years. Scott adds, in pleasant banter, "the lamp burnt brightly during six years, eleven months, and some odd days, and then unluckily it went out. Why it went out, the adept could never guess; but he was certain that if the flame could only have burnt to the end of the septenary cycle, the experiment must have succeeded."