Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from _anti_ and _monachus_ than it is from _anti_ and _monos_ (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in nature. Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses, who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern pharmaceutics. Following Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the work of this trio of men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the Renaissance in medicine as in art--dominated medical treatment, or at least the department of pharmaceutics, down almost to our own day, and their influence is still felt in drug-giving.