Although some of the first chemists were men of sense and learning, yet after that chemistry began to be fashionable and much in vogue, there were some of its professors, who although men of an uncommon turn of genius, were as great enthusiasts, both in the chemical and medical arts, as any other men ever were in religion. They not only pretended to transmute some of the baser metals into gold, contrary to the nature of things--and if they could have succeeded in that impossible work, it would have rendered gold as plentiful, cheap, and less valuable than iron, because it is less fit for instruments and mechanical uses--but they also pretended infallibly to cure all diseases, by some of their new invented chemical machines;--a thing equally as impossible as the other, and shewed their ignorance of the causes and nature of diseases. As those who are the most ignorant are generally the greatest boasters, we find that none of them were more so, than that vain, boasting, paradoxical enthusiast Paracelsus, who had acquired great riches by curing a certain disease with a mercurial ointment, the knowledge of which secret he is said to have stolen from Jacobus Berengarius, of Caipo, in his travels thither. He was withal so illiterate, that he said philosophy could be taught in no language but high Dutch; but the true reason was, that he neither understood philosophy nor any other language. He also boasted that he was in possession of a nostrum which would prolong man's life to the age of Methusaleh, though he died himself at the age of forty-seven. He lived in the fifteenth century. The cures he wrought were deemed so surprising in that age, that he was supposed to have recourse to supernatural aid. In a picture of him at Lumley Castle, he is represented in a close black gown, with both hands on a great sword, on whose hilt is inscribed the word Azot. This was the name of his _familiar_ spirit, that he kept imprisoned in the pummel, to consult on emergent occasions. The circumstance is thus alluded to by Butler:-- Bombastes kept the Devil's Bird Shut in the pummel of his sword; And taught him all the cunning pranks, Of past and future mountebanks.