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When he visited a town, cavalcades met him afar out, and as he approached, little girls in white and boys dressed in velvet ran before and strewed flowers in front of his carriage. Oh, the Duke of Mantua was a great man! In his retinue was a troop of comedians, a court fool, two dwarfs for luck, seven cooks, three alchemists and an astrologer.
In practice there was a fission, and procreation becomes an independent problem for alchemists. Yet the followers of the art did learn from nature, in order that their art might follow the works of nature even to improve on her; what wonder then if many of them set themselves to the artificial creation—generation—of man? Yet the belief in generatio equivoca has not long been dead.
Each of them believes that he is on the verge of a great discovery, in which Virginia Snake Root will be an ingredient, heaven knows why! Virginia Snake Root fascinates the imagination of the herbalist as mercury used to fascinate the alchemists.
With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time and exchanged the discoveries of recent inquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchemists. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy.
And then after supper we will walk half-way home across that beautiful valley beautiful even in winter with my father and Walter, and count the stars, and take new lessons in astronomy, and hear tales about the astrologers and the alchemists, with their fine old dreams. Ah! it will be such a happy Christmas!
He used to boast that he had wandered over all Europe, been in Sweden, Italy, in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with barber-surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting mines, and forges of Sweden and Bohemia, especially those which the rich merchants of that day had in the Tyrol. It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what he knew: from the study of nature and of facts.
Tycho was not merely a believer in the medical dogmas of the alchemists, he was actually the discoverer of a new elixir, which went by his name, and which was sold in every apothecary's shop as a specific against the epidemic diseases which were then ravaging Germany.
And yet he did so reluctantly, very regretfully, chafing as only the strong-willed do, when confronted and thwarted by that which is only apparently impossible, and which they still feel might and ought to be accomplished. "I feel as the old alchemists must have done," he often thought. "Here is a base metal. Why can I not transmute it into gold?"
One of the most interesting of these indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists is the man whose only name that we know is that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Much less had he aught in common with the tribe of alchemists, who sought, by a species of incantations, to evoke some surprising vitality from the laboratory. Neither had he imagined, with certain sanguine theosophists, that, by faithful adoration of the Highest, unheard-of powers would be vouchsafed to man.
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