“(1.) The alkahest never destroys the _seminal virtues_ of the bodies thereby dissolved: for instance, gold, by its action, is reduced to a _salt_ of gold, antimony to _a salt of antimony_, etc., of the same seminal virtues, or characters with the original concrete. (2.) The _subject exposed_ to its operation is converted into its three principles, salt, sulphur, and mercury, and afterwards into salt alone, which then becomes volatile, and at length is wholly turned into clear water. (3.) Whatever it dissolves may be rendered volatile by a sand-heat; and if, after volatilizing the solvent, it be distilled therefrom, the body is left pure, insipid water, but always _equal in quantity to its original self_.” Further, we find Van Helmont, the elder, saying of this salt that it will dissolve the most untractable bodies into substances of the same seminal virtues, “_equal in weight to the matter dissolved_;” and he adds, “This salt, by being several times cohobated with Paracelsus, _sal circulatum_, loses all its fixedness, and at length becomes an insipid water, _equal in quantity_ to the salt it was made from.”[320] The objection that might be made by Professor Cooke, in behalf of modern science, to the hermetic expressions, would equally apply to the Egyptian hieratic writings—they hide that which was meant to be concealed. If he would profit by the labors of the past, he must employ the cryptographer, and not the satirist. Paracelsus, like the rest, exhausted his ingenuity in transpositions of letters and abbreviations of words and sentences. For example, when he wrote _sutratur_ he meant tartar, and _mutrin_ meant nitrum, and so on. There was no end to the pretended explanations of the meaning of the alkahest. Some imagined that it was an alkaline of salt of tartar salatilized; others that it meant _algeist_, a German word which means all-spirit, or spirituous. Paracelsus usually termed salt “the centre of water wherein metals ought to die.” This gave rise to the most absurd suppositions, and some persons—such as Glauber—thought that the alkahest was the spirit of salt. It requires no little hardihood to assert that Paracelsus and his colleagues were ignorant of the natures of elementary and compound {192} substances; they may not be called by the same names as are now in fashion, but that they were known is proved by the results attained. What matters it by what name the gas given off when iron is dissolved in sulphuric acid was called by Paracelsus, since he is recognized, even by our standard authorities, as the discoverer of _hydrogen_?[321] His merit is the same; and though Van Helmont may have concealed, under the name “seminal virtues,” his knowledge of the fact that elementary substances have their original properties, which the entering into compounds only temporarily modifies—never destroys—he was none the less the greatest chemist of his age, and the peer of modern scientists. He