Amongst the researches of different authors, who, animated with a sacred zeal for ancient learning, have endeavoured to establish the antiquity of chemical science, we find many conclusions deduced from an ingenious interpretation of the mythological fables[93] which are supposed to have been transmitted by the Egyptians; who, previous to the invention of letters, adopted this method of perpetuating their discoveries in natural philosophy. Thus, wherever Homer studiously describes the stolen embraces of Mars and Venus, they recognise some chemical secret, some combination of iron with copper, shadowed in the glowing ornaments of fiction. Lord Bacon[94] conceived that the union of spirit and matter was allegorised in the fable of Proserpine being seized by Pluto as she was gathering flowers; an allusion, says Dr. Darwin, which is rendered more curiously exact by the late discovery, that pure air, (_oxygen_) is given out by vegetables, and that in this state it is greedily absorbed by inflammable bodies. The same ingenious Poet supposes that the fable of Jupiter and Juno, by whose union the vernal showers were said to be produced, was meant to pourtray the production of water by the combination of its two elements; an opinion which, says he, is strongly supported by the fact that, in the ancient mythology, the purer air or _æther_, was always represented by Jupiter, and the inferior by Juno. Were the elegant author of the Botanic Garden now living, he would, no doubt, with a taste and delicacy peculiarly his own, avail himself of the singular discovery of Mr. Smithson, who has detected in the juice of the mulberry _two_ distinct species of colouring matter;—the mingled blood of the unfortunate Pyramus and Thisbe: “Signa tene cædis: pullosque et luctibus aptos Semper habe feætus, _gemina_ monumenta cruoris.” _Ovid. Metamorph. Lib._ iv. 160.