Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at that time, that he may wonder at them, so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed the ages fled. He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd. No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity. And not only is such a study instructive: he who reads for amusement only, will find no chapter in the annals of the human mind more amusing than this. It opens out the whole realm of fiction--the wild, the fantastic, and the wonderful, and all the immense variety of things "that are not, and cannot be; but that have been imagined and believed." BOOK I.--THE ALCHYMISTS OR, SEARCHERS FOR THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE AND THE WATER OF LIFE. "Mercury (loquitur).--The mischief a secret any of them know, above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate, their precipitate, and their unctions; their male and their female, sometimes their hermaphrodite--what they list to style me! They will calcine you a grave matron, as it might be a mother of the maids, and spring up a young virgin out of her ashes, as fresh as a phoenix; lay you an old courtier on the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!"--Ben Jonson's Masque "Mercury vindicated from the Alchymists." THE ALCHYMISTS. PART I.--HISTORY OF ALCHYMY FROM THE EARLIEST PERIODS TO THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. PRETENDED ANTIQUITY OF THE ART.--GEBER.--ALFARABI.--AVICENNA.--ALBERTUS MAGNUS.--THOMAS AQUINAS.--ARTEPHIUS.--ALAIN DE LISLE.--ARNOLD DE VILLENEUVE.--PIETRO D'APONE.--RAYMOND LULLI.--ROGER BACON.--POPE JOHN XXII.--JEAN DE MEUNG.--NICHOLAS FLAMEL.--GEORGE RIPLEY.--BASIL VALENTINE.--BERNARD OF TREVES.--TRITHEMIUS.--THE MARECHAL DE RAYS.--JACQUES COEUR.--INFERIOR ADEPTS.