Hohenheim, and was christened Theophrastus, in honour of Theophrastus Tyrtamos, a Greek physician, philosopher, and follower of Aristotle. This child was subsequently to be known to fame and held up to obloquy under the title of Paracelsus. It was a period in which the world was in labour with great events. Only a year before Columbus had landed on American soil. In the same year, or the previous one, passed away a man whose life was destined to create as great a revolution in the history of the human race as that of Columbus himself—William Caxton. Returning from a long sojourn in the Netherlands in or about 1474, Caxton established his printing press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and before his death at least sixty-four books are known to have been issued from this first English Printing House. Ten years exactly before Paracelsus’s birth, a third of these great makers of revolutions had seen the light. On 10th November 1483, Martin Luther was born at Eisleben in Lower Saxony, and when the subject of these notes was twenty-four years old, Luther nailed his ninety-five theses against the Doctrine of Indulgences on the church door at Wittenberg. Paracelsus, when occasion offered, did not attempt to disguise his sympathy with this bold reformer, though he took no actual part in the movement, and he was accused by his enemies of being a medical Luther, a charge which he took pains to show that he did not in any way resent. Another noteworthy character in the realm of History and Literature, Lorenzo de Medici, had passed away a year before our hero’s birth. In England the Wars of the Roses were over, and Henry VII. was busy establishing monarchy on a firm basis, the people, worn out by incessant struggles, being glad to accept the Tudor rule, sympathetic as it always was to the middle and commercial classes. In Europe there was no Austrian Emperor, and Italy was still fated, for centuries to come, to remain a geographical expression. The Holy Roman Empire extended from the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea on the North to the Adriatic on the South. Poland and Lithuania extended far along its Eastern border, and the outmost limit of the realm of the Muscovite was still 500 miles east of the site where a century later Peter the Great was to found and give his name to the capital of the Russian Empire. The conquering Turk was thundering at the gates of Christendom. Ferdinand and Isabella, patrons of Columbus, reigned at Madrid. Everywhere throughout the civilised world vast changes were impending, everywhere the horizon was widening, and men’s minds were being directed into new channels and to fresh fields of enterprise and of opinion.