The reputation of Bacon as a magician spread over Western Europe. He was supposed to be indebted for his wisdom to incessant communication with demons. Wierus accuses him of goëtic magic, and erudite persons affirm that Antichrist will make use of his enchanted mirrors for the performance of lying miracles. He really believed in judicial astrology and in the philosophical stone. “By neglecting the lights of experience,” he says, “alchemy can seldom produce gold of twenty-four carats. Few persons have carried the science to so high a point. But with the help of Aristotle’s ‘Secret of Secrets,’ experimental science has manufactured not only gold of twenty-four degrees, but of thirty, forty, and onward according to pleasure.” The application of alchemy to the extension of life was another subject of study with Roger Bacon. The grand secret, he assures us, does not only ensure the welfare of the commonwealth and of the individual, but it may be used to prolong life, for that operation by which the most inferior metals is purged from the corrupt elements which they contain till they are exalted into the purest gold and silver, is considered by every adept to be eminently calculated to eliminate so completely the corrupt particles of the human body, that the life of mortality may be extended to several centuries. A citation by Franciscus Picus from Bacon’s “Book of the Six Sciences” recounts how a man may become a prophet and predict the future by means of a mirror which Bacon calls _Almuchefi_, composed in accordance with the laws of perspective under the influence of a benign constellation, _and after the body of the individual has been modified by alchemy_. On the word of a man who enjoyed his full confidence, he tells us how a celebrated Parisian savant, after cutting a serpent into fragments, taking care to preserve intact the skin of its belly, subsequently let loose the animal, which began immediately to roll upon certain herbs, and their virtues speedily healed him. The experimenter examined these herbs, and found them of a remarkably green colour. On the authority of Artephius, he relates how a certain magician, named Tantalus, and who was attached to the person of the King of India, had discovered by his proficiency in planetary lore, a method of preserving life over several centuries. He enlarges on the potency of theriac in the excessive prolongation of life. He lauds the flesh of winged serpents as a specific against senility in mankind. By the hygiene of Artephius he informs us that that adept lived over a thousand years. If Plato and Aristotle failed to prolong their existence it is not surprising, for they were ignorant even of the quadrature of the circle, which Bacon declares to have been well known at his time, and which is indefinitely inferior to the grand medical doctrine of Artephius.[I]