affirmed that the _aurum potabile_ could be obtained with the alkahest, by converting the whole body of gold into salt, retaining its seminal virtues, and being soluble in water. When chemists learn what he meant by _aurum potabile_, alkahest, salt, and seminal virtues—what he really meant, not what he said he meant, nor what was thought he meant—then, and not before, can our chemists safely assume such airs toward the fire-philosophers and those ancient masters whose mystic teachings they reverently studied. One thing is clear, at any rate. Taken merely in its exoteric form, this language of Van Helmont shows that he understood the solubility of metallic substances in water, which Sterry Hunt makes the basis of his theory of metalliferous deposits. We would like to see what sort of terms would be invented by our scientific contempories to conceal and yet half-reveal their audacious proposition that man’s “only God is the cineritious matter of his brain,” if in the basement of the new Court House or the cathedral on Fifth Avenue there were a torture-chamber, to which judge or cardinal could send them at will. Professor Sterry Hunt says in one of his lectures:[322] “The alchemists sought in vain for a universal solvent; but we now know that water, aided in some cases by heat, pressure, and the presence of certain widely-distributed substances, such as carbonic acid and alkaline carbonates and sulphides, will dissolve the most insoluble bodies; so that it may, after all, be looked upon as the long-sought for alkahest or universal menstruum.” This reads almost like a paraphrase of Van Helmont, or Paracelsus himself! They knew the properties of water as a solvent as well as modern chemists, and what is more, made no concealment of the fact; which shows that this was not _their_ universal solvent. Many commentaries and criticisms of their works are still extant, and one can hardly take up a book on the subject without finding at least one {193} of their speculations of which they never thought of making a mystery. This is what we find in an old work on alchemists—a satire, moreover—of 1820, written at the beginning of our century when the new theories on the chemical potency of water were hardly in their embryonic state. “It may throw some light to observe, that Van Helmont, as well as Paracelsus, _took water for the universal instrument (agent?) of chymistry_ and natural philosophy; and earth for the unchangeable basis of all things—that fire was assigned as the sufficient cause of all things—that seminal impressions were lodged in the mechanism of the earth—that water, by dissolving and fermenting with this earth, as it does by means of fire, brings forth everything; whence originally proceeded animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.”[323]