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Laboriously now, he toils forward in the darkness; the heights draw him on; escaping hell he will attain to heaven. His ascent up the holy mountain is hindered by a violent storm; he is thrown into the depths by the tempest: a symbol of circulation in the closed vessel of the alchemists, which vessel corresponds to the protected lodge.
In the midst of the contentious Christian sects of the capital, both father and son remained heathen and worshippers of Isis; and when the old priest died at an advanced age, Horapollo moved to Memphis where he led the quiet and secluded life of a student, mingling only now and then with the astronomers, astrologers, and calendar-makers at the observatory, or visiting the alchemists' laboratories, where, even in Christian Egypt, they still devoted themselves to attempts to transmute the baser into the noble metals.
But Susie, though amused, felt that this was not the purpose for which she had asked him to come. Dr Porhoët had lent her his entertaining work on the old alchemists, and this gave her a chance to bring their conversation to matters on which Haddo was expert.
No one fares so ill in a crowd as the man who is wedged in the middle. A fourth, looking wild and dreamy, as if he had come out of the cave of Trophonius, and who is a mesmerizer and a mystic, thinks Enlightenment is in full career towards the good old days of alchemists and necromancers.
Though he was eager in pursuit of his military distinction, of his fortune, of himself, perhaps it was in obedience to the inexplicable feeling, the latent germ in every man's heart, to which we owe the experiments of alchemists, the passion for glory, the discoveries of astronomy and of physics, everything which prompts man to expand his being by multiplying himself through deeds or ideas.
You may if you like call an ass an ox, but you will never make anyone believe that your ox is an ass." Boyle is very severe on the vague and loose use of words practised by so many writers of his time. Most of the alchemists taught that the elements produced what they called seed, by their mutual reactions, and the principles matured this seed and brought it to perfection.
In each booth there was a little kitchen, a mere earthen fire-pot, such as the alchemists used of old, but larger, and there were tables made of boards laid on trestles with rude benches for seats, and there were little ten-gallon barrels of wine still unbroached, and piles of loaves covered with clean white cloths, and there was much green lettuce for salad, floating in tubs full of water, and there were also fresh onions without end, with their long stalks and big bunches of tiny flowers.
Those are antiquated distinctions, like the four elements of the alchemists." "Well but what is the thing, then?" asked Corbario, almost impatiently. "What should you call it in scientific language?" Kalmon closed his eyes for a moment, as if to collect his thoughts.
Processes of burning were regarded by alchemists and phlogisteans alike, as processes of simplification. The fact had been noticed and recorded, during the middle ages, that the earth-like matter which remains when a metal is calcined is heavier than the metal itself.
Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain schoolcraft, which we call the Medical Art, and which, alone in this age of science, has made no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest teachers had I said, in the true humility of genuine knowledge, 'these alchemists were men of genius and thought; we owe to them nearly all the grand hints of our chemical science, is it likely that they would have been wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they clung to the most? had I said that, I might now have no fear of losing my Lilian.
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