It is said that Saint-Germain was no other than that mysterious Althotas who was the Master in Magic of another adept with whom we are about to be occupied and who took the Kabalistic name of Acharat. The supposition has no foundation, as will be seen in due course. Whilst the Comte de Saint-Germain was thus in request at Paris, another mysterious adept was on his way through the world, recruiting apostles for the philosophy of Hermes. He was an alchemist who called himself Lascaris and gave out that he was an eastern archimandrite, charged with collecting alms for a Greek convent. The distinction was this, that instead of demanding money, Lascaris seemed occupied, so to speak, in sowing his path with gold and leaving the trail of it behind him wherever he went. His appearances were momentary only and his guises many; here he was old and in the next place still a young man. He did not make gold in public on his own part, but caused it to be made by his disciples, with whom he left at parting a little of the powder of projection. Nothing is better established than the transmutations operated by these emissaries of Lascaris. M. Louis Figuier, in his learned work on the alchemists, does not question either their reality or their importance. Now, in physics above all, there in nothing more inexorable than facts, and it must be therefore concluded from these that the Philosophical Stone is not a matter of reverie, if the vast tradition of occultism, the ancient mythologies and the serious researches of great men in all ages are not otherwise sufficient to establish its real existence.[316] A modern chemist, who has not failed to publish his secret, has arrived at the extraction of gold from silver by a ruinous process, for the silver sacrificed by him does not produce in gold more than the tenth of its value, or thereabouts. Agrippa, who never attained the universal dissolvent, was notwithstanding more fortunate than our chemist, for he did obtain gold which was equivalent in value to the silver employed in his process and did not therefore lose his labour absolutely, if to employ it in research after the grand secrets of Nature can be called loss.