A complete account of the growth and development of scientific discoveries and inventions would form an extensive history, and would include numerous instances of experiments attended by results which, sooner or later, affected all mankind. Take that of phosphorus, for example. The first evidence of the existence of that substance was obtained by the Saracens in the eighth century. Achild Bechil distilled a powdered mixture of charcoal, clay, lime, and dried extract of urine, and obtained a substance which shone in the dark "like a good moon;" that substance was phosphorus. The discovery contained in the results of that little dirty and stinking experiment was the germ or seed of all the subsequent developments and applications of phosphorus. About the year 1669 Bechil's experiment was further developed by Brandt, a merchant of Hamburg, and the publication of the wonderful properties of the substance produced a great sensation in his fellow-citizens. "There was then cried nothing but triumph and victory among the chymists. Those good people erected already in their thoughts so many hospitals and poor-houses that no beggar should more molest any man in the streets, made great legacies, and pious causes, and what not else." "Besides, the other alchymists did encourage him yet more, and desisted not to make him believe how this was the same fiery ghost of {11} Moses that in the beginning moved upon the water, yea, his splendid shining face: the fiery pillar in the desert, that secret fire of the altar wherewith Moses burned the golden calf before he strewed it upon the fire and made it potable." The experiment of Brandt was repeated by Kunckel before the courts of Saxony and Brandenburg, although it was not a very delicate or agreeable exhibition, "because the anctuous and daubing oyliness was not yet accurately separated from it, and without doubt it was very stinking." Brandt's process was further developed by Boyle, and published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in the year 1692-3; and phosphorus was afterwards obtained in larger quantity and in a purer state by Hanckwitz, a chemist in Southampton Street, Strand, and sold by him at three pounds sterling per ounce. Its price at present is less than three shillings per pound.