Had the opinion, that gold and silver could be artificially formed originated with Hermes Trismegistus, or had it prevailed among the ancient Egyptians, it would certainly have been alluded to by Herodotus, who spent so many years in Egypt, and was instructed by the priests in all the science of the Egyptians. Had _chemistry_ been the name of a science, real or fictitious, which existed as early as the expedition of the Argonauts, and had so many treatises on it, as Suidas alleges existed in Egypt before the reign of Dioclesian, it could hardly have escaped the notice of Pliny, who was so curious and so indefatigable in his researches, and who has collected in his natural history a kind of digest of all the knowledge of the ancients in every department of practical science. The fact that the term chemistry (χημεια) never occurs in any Greek or Roman writer prior to Suidas, who wrote so late as the eleventh century, seems to overturn all idea of the existence of that pretended science among the ancients, notwithstanding the elaborate attempts of Olaus Borrichius to prove the contrary. I am disposed to believe, that chemistry or alchymy, understanding by the term the _art of making gold and silver_, originated among the Arabians, when they began to turn their attention to medicine, after the establishment of the caliphs; or if it had previously been cultivated by Greeks (as the writings of Zosimus, the Panapolite, if genuine, would lead us to suppose), that it was taken up by the Arabians, and reduced by them into regular form and order. If the works of Geber be genuine, they leave little doubt on this point. Geber is supposed to have been a physician, and to have written in the seventh century. He admits, as a first principle, that metals are compounds of mercury and sulphur. He talks of the philosopher’s stone; professes to give the mode of preparing it; and teaches the way of converting the different metals, known in his time, into medicines, on whose efficacy he bestows the most ample panegyrics. Thus the principles which lie at the bottom of alchymy were implicitly adopted by him. Yet I can nowhere find in him any attempt to make gold artificially. His chemistry was entirely devoted to the improvement of medicine. The subsequent pretensions of the alchymists to convert the baser metals into gold are no where avowed by him. I am disposed from this to suspect, that the theory of gold-making was started after Geber’s time, or at least that it was after the seventh century, before any alchymist ventured to affirm that he himself was in possession of the secret, and could fabricate gold artificially at pleasure. For there is a wide distance between the opinion that gold may be made artificially and the affirmation that we are in possession of a method by which this transmutation of the baser metals into gold can be accomplished. The first may be adopted and defended with much plausibility and perfect