ter into texts; and the first, by a marginal note, we find is this: "The great mysterie is the mother of all things." This ejaculation is expanded in the text in this manner: "All created things are of a fraill and perishing nature, and had all at first but one only principle or beginning. In this principle all things under the cope of heaven were enclosed and lay hid; which is thus to be understood, that all things proceeded out of one matter, and not every particular thing out of its own private matter by itselfe. This common matter of all things is the Greate Mysterie, which no certain essence or prefigured or formed idea could comprehend, nor could it comply with any property, it being altogether void of colour and elementary nature. The scope of this greate mysterie is as large as the firmament. And the greate mysterie was the mother of all the elements, and the grandmother of all the starrs, trees, and carnall creatures. As children are born of a mother, so all created things, whether sensible or insensible, all things whatsoever were uniformly brought out of the great mysterie. So that the greate Mysterie is the one mother of all perishing things, out of which they all sprung, not in order of succession or continuation, but they came forth together and at once, in one creation, substance, matter, form, essence, nature and inclination." After this we are not much wiser than before; but it must be owned that Paracelsus has a certain grand manner of venting nothing.

That water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, two measures of the latter to one of the former, every reader of the most elementary treatise on natural philosophy now

knows. The following will perhaps therefore serve as well as any other citation to help us to ascertain the amount of true chemical science possessed by Paracelsus. Text 17 is on "the various complexions of water," and is as follows: "Nor did water obtaine one kind of complexion onely. For there were infinite waters in that Element, which yet were all truly waters. The Phylosopher cannot understand that the Element of water is onely cold and moyst of it selfe. It is an hundred times more cold, and not more moyst, and yet it is not to be refer'd as well to the hotnesse as the coldnesse. Nor doth the element of water live and flourish onely in cold and moyst in one degree: no neither is it fully and wholly of one degree. Some waters are fountaines, which are of many sorts. Some are seas, which also are many and divers. Other are streams and rivers and none of which is like another. Some watry elements were disposed of into stones, as Berill, Chrystal, Calcedony, Amethyst. Some into plants, as Corall, &c. Some into juyce, as the liquor of life.

For that

that was

Many in the earth, as the moysture of the ground. These are the Elements of water, but in a manifold sort. which groweth out of the earth, from the seed sown, that also belongs to the element of water. So what was fleshy as the Nymphs belong also to the element of water. Though in this case we may conceive that the element of water was changed into another complexion, yet it doth never put off or passe from that very nature of the element from which it proceeded. Whatsoever is of the water, turneth again to water: that which is of fire

into fire; that of earth into earth; and that of aire into aire." From which it is very plain that our physician did not know what fire or water was.

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Nor is he any wiser as to the electricity and electric storms of the air; for "thunder," he writes, comes from the procreations of the firmament, because that consisteth of the element of fire. Thunder is, as it were, the harvest of the stars at the very instant of time when it was ready to work according to its nature. Magicall tempests rise out of the aire and there end." This is poetically grand. What follows has much more of the comic element in its floundering braggadocio. "Many things proceed out of the store (i.e. of nature) through mistake, or in (un)due time. Deformed men, wormes, and many more such like generations, proceed from the impressions. The infection. of countries, the plague and famine, is from the fatall stormes. Beetles, cankers, dalnes (?), breed in dung. To the elements did there but four special kindes of the great mystery belong, so they had but four principles. But men had six hundred. Crump-feeted men had one, the Ciclopes another. Gyants another, the Medchili another. So had they that dwell in the earth, in the aire, in the water, and in the fire. Things that also grow had every one its own proper mysterie in the Greate Mysterie whence came out so many kinds of creatures. So many trees, so

many men, so many mysteries too."

Even when Paracelsus leaves his windy discourse où things of which he knows nothing, for a few moments,

and tells us that "Earthy men are not happy," as he does in the eleventh text of the second book of his philosophy, he is sensible only for a short time. The following sentence might have been written by Sir Thomas Browne or have been penned by Ruskin: "It is a silly and vain philosophy to place all happiness and eternity in our element of earth. A foolish opinion is it to boast that we only are of all creatures the most noble. There are more worlds than one; nor are there none besides us in our own. But this ignorance is much more capital that we know not those men that are of the same element with us, as the Nocturnals, Gnomes, &c. who, though they live. not in the clear glory of heaven, nor have any light of the firmament, but hate what we love, and love what we hate, and though they are not like us in form, essence, or sustentation; yet is there no cause of wonder. For they were made such in the great mystery. We are not all that are made; there are many more whom we know not of."

Would that all that Paracelsus had written were like to this, but, alas! his medical writings are full of credulity or imposture. He believed, or pretended to believe, that man could himself create or make a child resembling those born of women, only smaller and weaker, and his directions for this strange proceeding are, says a critic very justly, "too absurd and indecent to be quoted." He tells us that "Stannar is the mother of metals, and that metals are nothing but thickened smoke from

stannar; that man is composed of smoke, 'Man is a coagulated fume,' and that the coagulation of the spermatick matter is made of nothing but the seething vapours and spermatick members of the body. We see nothing in our own selves but thickened smoke made up into a man by humane predestination." Moreover, "fiery dragons and ghosts proceed from stones;" and "things invisible eat and are nourished as well as things visible," about which, at least, he could know nothing. He attempts closely to explain the analogy which he supposes to exist between the Macrocosmos or external world and the Microcosmos or human body, and believed that every physician ought to be able to point out in man the east and west and the signs of the Zodiac, according, indeed, to that ancient catalogue still printed in Zadkiel's and Moore's almanacs. He tells us that the human body contains, or rather consists of nothing but mercury, sulphur, and salt. He recommends people, in curing a wound, to use the verba constellata, or astrological and cabalistic words, which would effect a certain cure when all other methods had failed.

"He made great use of cabalistic writers," says Tennemann ("Manual of Philosophy"), "which he endeavoured to render popular, and expounded with a lively imagination." He belonged to the school of the Mystics, and has himself founded a school. His mystic notions were many, chief amongst them are those of an emanation from the Deity, of an internal illumination, of the influence of the stars, of the vitality of the elements,