the so-called “miracles” instead of denying them, many secret laws of nature comprehended by the ancients would have been again discovered. “Conviction,” says Bacon, “comes not through arguments but through experiments.” The ancients were always distinguished—especially the Chaldean astrologers and Magians—for their ardent love and pursuit of knowledge in every branch of science. They tried to penetrate the secrets of {50} nature in the same way as our modern naturalists, and by the only method by which this object can be obtained, namely: by experimental researches and reason. If our modern philosophers cannot apprehend the fact that they penetrated deeper than themselves into the mysteries of the universe, this does not constitute a valid reason why the credit of possessing this knowledge should be denied them or the imputation of superstition laid at their door. Nothing warrants the charge; and every new archæological discovery militates against the assumption. As chemists they were unequalled, and in his famous lecture on _The Lost Arts_, Wendell Phillips says: “The chemistry of the most ancient period had reached a point which _we have never even approached_.” The secret of the malleable glass, which, “if supported by one end by its own weight, in twenty hours dwindles down to a fine line that you can curve around your wrist,” would be as difficult to rediscover in our civilized countries as to fly to the moon. The fabrication of a cup of glass which was brought by an exile to Rome in the reign of Tiberius,—a cup “which he dashed upon the marble pavement, and it was not crushed nor broken by the fall,” and which, as it got “dented some” was easily brought into shape again with a hammer, is a historic fact. If it is doubted now it is merely because the moderns cannot do the same. And yet, in Samarkand and some monasteries of Thibet such cups and glassware may be found to this day; nay, there are persons who claim that they can make the same by virtue of their knowledge of the much-ridiculed and ever-doubted _alkahest_—the universal solvent. This agent that Paracelsus and Van Helmont maintain to be a certain fluid in nature, “capable of reducing all sublunary bodies, as well homogeneous as mixed, into their _ens primum_, or the original matter of which they are composed; or into an uniform, equable, and potable liquor, that will unite with water, and the juices of all bodies, and yet retain its own radical virtues; and, if again mixed with itself will thereby be converted into pure elementary water: “what impossibilities prevent our crediting the statement? Why should it not exist and why the idea be considered Utopian? Is it again because our modern chemists are unable to produce it? But surely it may be conceived without any great effort of imagination that all bodies must have originally come from some first matter, and that this matter, according to the lessons of astronomy, geology and physics, must have been a fluid.