A man of violent passions, coarse, drunken, arrogant, and unscrupulous, =Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus von Hohenheim=—to give him his full name—would seem to have possessed none of the attributes needed by the successful leader of an intellectual revolution. Born at Etzel in Switzerland in 1493, son of a physician, William Bombast von Hohenheim, who combined the practice of astrology with that of alchemy, Paracelsus, even as a youth, became a wanderer, passing from province to province and cloister to cloister, living by telling fortunes and practising sometimes as a quack and at other times as an army surgeon, and gaining, as he tells us, much curious information from old women, gipsies, conjurers, and chemists. If we may trust his own account of himself, he had, before he was thirty-three, wandered over the whole of Europe, and even into Africa and Asia, everywhere performing miraculous cures and constantly getting into trouble. In 1526 he secured the appointment of Professor of Physic in the University of Basle, and signalised his occupancy of the chair by a course of lectures—a farrago of confused German and barbarous Latin—in which he assailed with extraordinary vigour and unexampled coarseness the medical system of the school of Galen. Scandalised as his professional brethren might be, Paracelsus expressed, intentionally or unintentionally, the feeling of impatience with which the laity viewed a system of therapeutics based only on tradition. In this revolt against authority he initiated a movement which, whatever might have been its influence on medicine, served eventually, under the guidance of worthier men, to emancipate chemistry from the thraldom of alchemy. Paracelsus did little more than initiate. Although his many tracts show that he was familiar with nearly every chemical preparation of his time, many of which he used in his practice, he added no new substance to science. A man of great ability and extraordinary talent, he squandered his powers in dissipation. His intemperate conduct soon lost him his chair at Basle; and, after an ignoble quarrel with the magistracy, he fled the town, and, resuming his wandering life, died, under wretched circumstances, at Salzburg, in his forty-eighth year. Space will not permit of any account of the philosophical opinions of Paracelsus—of his mysticism, his theosophy, his pantheism, his extraordinary doctrine of the Archæus and Tartarus, his association of astrology with medicine. His chief merit lies in his insistence that the true function of chemistry was not to make gold artificially, but to prepare medicines and substances useful to the arts. He thereby made chemistry indispensable to medicine, and thenceforward chemistry began to be taught in the universities and in the schools as an essential part of a medical education.