ALCUIN (735-804), the great reviver of learning in the eighth century, was an ecclesiastic who instructed Charlemagne and his family in rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and divinity. “France,” says a great writer, “is indebted to Alcuin for all the polite learning it boasted in that and the following ages. The universities of Paris, Tours, Fulden, Soissons, and many others, owe to him their origin and increase.” By the benefits he obtained from Charlemagne for the Christian schools which he founded, education began to revive in Europe, and by the Emperor’s command schools were established in every convent and cathedral throughout his vast empire, wherein not clerics alone, but the sons of the nobility who were destined for a secular life, could receive the highest education at that time attainable. “The monasteries became a kind of fortress in which civilization sheltered itself under the banner of some saint; the culture of high intelligence was preserved there, and philosophic truth was reborn there of religious truth. Political truth, or liberty, found an exponent and a defender in the monk, who searched into everything, said everything, and feared nothing. Without the inviolability and the leisure of the cloister, the books and the languages of the ancient world would never have been transmitted to us, and the chain which connects the past with the present would have been snapped. Astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, civil law, physic and medicine, the profane authors, grammar, and the _belles lettres_, all the arts, had a succession of professors uninterrupted from the first days of Clovis down to the age when the universities, themselves religious foundations, brought science forth from the monasteries. To establish this fact it is enough to name Alcuin, Anghilbert, Eginhard, Treghan, Loup de Terrières, Eric d’Auxerre, Hincmar, Odo of Clugny, Cherbert, Abbon, Fulbert.”[722] THE ORIGIN OF CHEMISTRY. The great importance of the science of chemistry in its connection with that of medicine, compels some allusion to its origin. Without question alchemy was the forerunner of chemistry. Beginning in the search for the means of transmuting base metals into gold, it ultimately endowed us with a far more precious knowledge—the art of preparing many of our most valuable medicines. The first authentic account of alchemy is an edict of Diocletian about A.D. 300, in which a diligent search is ordered to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be destroyed. This shows that the pursuit must have been of great antiquity. Fable credits Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes amongst its adepts. We find nothing more about it till its revival by the Arabians some five or six hundred years later.[723]