Modern science discards all these mythological accounts. Whatever knowledge the ancients acquired of medicine and chemistry was, no doubt, reached along two lines--pharmacy and metallurgy. That the pharmacist or apothecary exercised his calling at a very early period we have positive knowledge; thus in the Book of Ecclesiastes we are told that "dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor," and that men at a very early day found out the means of working iron, copper, gold, silver, etc., is evident from the accounts given of Vulcan and Tubalcain, as well as from the remains of old tools and weapons. And that Alchemy, as it is generally understood, is a comparatively modern outgrowth of these two arts, is pretty certain. No mention of the art of converting the baser metals into gold, and no account of a universal medicine or elixir of life is to be found in any of the authentic writings of the ancients. Homer, Aristotle, and even Pliny are all silent on the subject, and those writings which treat of the art, and which claim an ancient origin, such as the books of Hermes Trismegistus, are now regarded by the best authorities as spurious--the evidence that they were the work of a far later age being irrefragable. Several writers have taken the ground that the alchemical treatises which have come down to us from the early writers on the subject, are purely allegorical and do not relate to material things, but to the principles of a higher religion which, in those days, it was dangerous to expound in plain language. One or two elaborate works and several articles supporting this view have been published, but the common-sense reader who will glance through the immense collection of alchemical tracts gathered together by Mangetus in two folio volumes of a thousand pages each, will rise from such examination, very thoroughly convinced that it was the actual metal gold, and the fabled universal medicine that these writers had in view. There can be little doubt that Geber, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully, Helvetius, Van Helmont, Basil Valentine, and others, describe very substantial things with a minuteness of detail which leaves no room for doubt as to their materiality though we cannot always be sure of their identity.