While we do not know the absolute data of either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine and are not sure of the exact period even in which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and various salts of the metals, and above all introduced antimony to the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises nor by his observations. There is no doubt, however, that the observational method which he employed furnished an immense amount of knowledge, and formed the basis of the method of investigation by which the chemical side of medicine was to develop during the next two or three centuries. Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, but then great harm is done by the abuse of anything, no matter how good it may be. For a time it came to be the most important drug in medicine and was only replaced by venesection. The fact of the matter is that doctors were looking for effects from their drugs, and antimony is, above all things, effective. Patients, too, wished to see the effect of the medicines they took. They do so even yet, and when antimony was administered there was no doubt about its working. The most interesting of Basil Valentine's books, and the one which has had the most enduring influence, is undoubtedly "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony."[31] It has been translated and has had a wide vogue in every language of modern Europe. Its recommendation of antimony had such an effect upon medical practice that it continued to be the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia down almost to the middle of the nineteenth century. If any proof were needed that Basil Valentine or that the author of the books that go under the name was a monk it would be found in the introduction to this volume, which not only states that fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use of language that shows the writer to have been deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I quote the first paragraph of this introduction because it emphasizes this. The quotation is taken from the English translation of the work as published in London in 1678. Curiously enough, seeing the obscurity surrounding Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who made the translation. The translator apologizes somewhat for the deeply religious spirit of the book, but considers that he was not justified in eliminating any of this. The paragraph is left in the quaint, old-fashioned form so eminently suited to the thoughts of the old master, and the spelling and use of capitals is not changed.