The mystical doctrines of Paracelsus are supposed to have given origin to the sect of Rosecrucians, concerning which so much has been written and so little certain is known. It is not at all unlikely that the greatest part, if not the whole that has been stated about the antiquity, and extent, and importance of this sect, is mere fiction, and that the origin of the whole was nothing else than a ludicrous performance of Valentine Andreæ, an ecclesiastic of Calwe, in the country of Wirtemburg, a man of much learning, genius, and philanthropy. From his life, written by himself, and preserved in the library of Wolfenbuttel, we learn that in the year 1603 he drew up the celebrated Noce Chimique of Christian Rosenkreuz, in order to counteract the alchymistical and the theosophistical dogmas so common at that period. He was unable to restrain his risible faculties when he saw this _ludibrium juvenilis ingenii_ adopted as a true history, while he meant it merely as a satire. It is believed that the Fama Fraternitatis is a production of this ecclesiastic, and that he published it in order to correct the chemists and enthusiasts of the time. He himself was called Andreæ, Knight of the Rose-cross (_rosæ crucis_) because he had engraven on his seal a cross with four roses. It is true that Andreæ instituted, in 1620, a _fraternitas christiana_, but with quite other views than those which are supposed to have actuated the Rosecrucians. His object was to correct the religious opinions of the times, and to separate Christian theology from scholastic controversies, with which it had been unhappily intermixed. He himself, in different parts of his writings, distinguishes carefully between the Rosecrucians and his own society, and amuses himself with the credulity of the German theosophists, who adopted so readily his fiction for a series of truths. It would appear, therefore, that this secret order of Rosecrucians, notwithstanding the brilliant origin assigned to it, really owes its birth to the pleasantry of a clergyman of Wirtemburg, who endeavoured by that means to set bounds to the chimeras of theosophy, but who unfortunately only increased still more the adherents of this absurd science. A crowd of enthusiasts found it too advantageous to propagate the principles of the _rosa crux_ not to endeavour to unite them into a sect. Valentine Weigel, a fanatical preacher at Tschoppau, near Chemnitz, left at his death a prodigious number of followers, who were already Rosecrucians, without bearing the name. Egidius Gutmann, of Suabia, was equally a Rosecrucian, without bearing the name; he condemned all pagan medicines, and affirmed that he possessed the universal remedy which ennobles man, cures all diseases, and gives man the power of fabricating gold. “To fly in the air, to transmute metals, and to know all the sciences,” says he, “nothing more is requisite than faith.”