It was a little late to search for the philosophers' stone in 1669, yet it was in such a search that phosphorus was discovered. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) described it in the following manner: Brand, "a man little known, of low birth, with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did, found this luminous matter while searching for something else. He was a glassmaker by profession, but he had abandoned it in order to be free for the pursuit of the philosophical stone with which he was engrossed. Having put it into his mind that the secret of the philosophical stone consisted in the preparation of urine, this man worked in all kinds of manners and for a very long time without finding anything. Finally, in the year 1669, after a strong distillation of urine, he found in the recipient a luminant matter that has since been called phosphorus. He showed it to some of his friends, among them Mister Kunkel [sic]."[1] Neither the name nor the phenomenon were really new. Organic phosphorescent materials were known to Aristotle, and a lithophosphorus was the subject of a book published in 1640, based on a discovery made by a shoemaker, Vicenzo Casciarolo, on a mountain-side near Bologna in 1630.[2] Was the substance new which Brand showed to his friends? Johann Gottfried Leonhardi quotes a book of 1689 in which the author, Kletwich, claims that this phosphorus had already been known to Fernelius, the court physician of King Henri II of France (1154-1189).[3] To the same period belongs the "Ordinatio Alchid Bechil Saraceni philosophi," in which Ferdinand Hoefer found a distillation of urine with clay and carbonaceous material described, and the resulting product named escarbuncle.[4] It would be worth looking for this source; although Bechil would still remain an entirely unsuccessful predecessor, it does seem strange that in all the distillations of arbitrary mixtures, the conditions should never before 1669 have been right for the formation and the observation of phosphorus. [Illustration: Figure 1.--THE ALCHEMIST DISCOVERS PHOSPHORUS. A painting by Joseph Wright (1734-1779) of Derby, England.]