Contemporaneously with him was =Roger Bacon=, _Doctor Mirabilis_, one of the most erudite men of his age, who was born near Ilchester in Somerset in 1214, and, after studying at Oxford, became a friar, occupied himself in philosophical pursuits, and wrote numerous tracts on alchemy. He describes what was probably gunpowder, but there is no certain proof that he invented it. In his _De Secretis Artis et Naturæ_, written before 1249, he gives instructions for refining saltpetre, and in an anagram which Colonel Hime, in his _Gunpowder and Ammunition_, has interpreted, he states that a mixture “which will produce a thundering noise and a bright flash” may be made by taking “7 parts of saltpetre, 5 of young hazel wood, and 5 of sulphur.” He died in 1285. =Raymund Lully=, a friend and scholar of Bacon, was born in Majorca in 1225 (others say 1235), and was buried there in 1315. A member of the Order of Minorites, he had a great reputation as an alchemist; and a number of books on alchemy and chemical processes are ascribed to him. He described modes of obtaining nitric acid and aqua regia, and studied their action upon metals. He obtained alcohol by distillation, and knew how to dehydrate it by the aid of carbonate of potash, which he obtained by calcining cream of tartar. He prepared various tinctures and essential oils, and a number of metallic compounds, such as red and white precipitate. To him is usually ascribed the first idea of a universal medicine. There is some difficulty in believing that all that is ascribed to Lully was actually the work of his age, for it would appear to have been a common practice with the disciples and followers of a notable scholar to usher in their performances under their master’s name—a practice not unknown in later days. “So full are they of the experiments and observations which occur in our later writers that either the books must be suppositious, or the ancient chemists must have been acquainted with a world of things which pass for the discoveries of modern practice” (Boerhaave). The story is that Lully plunged into the study of chemistry from the desire to cure a maiden of a cancered breast, and that he was stoned to death in Africa, whither he had journeyed as a missionary. It has been further alleged that at one period of his life he made gold in the Tower of London by the King’s order, and that he offered Edward III. a supply of six millions to make war against the infidels. As Boerhaave drily remarks, “the history of this eminent adept is very much imbroiled.”