need it excite any wonder that in pursuit of
the ideal, they accidentally hit upon a good
deal that was real. The labours, therefore,
of the Arabian physicians were not thrown
away, though they entangled the feet of
science in mazes, from which escape was only
effected, after the lapse of centuries of
misdirected efforts.

From the period we have last spoken of,
until the commencement of the eleventh
century, the only Alchemist of note is the
Arabian Geber, who, though he wrote on the
perfections of metals, of the new found art of
making gold, in a word, on the philosopher's
stone, has only descended to our times as the
founder of that jargon, which passes under
the name of ' gibberish.' He was, however, a
great authority in the middle ages, and
allusions to ' Geber's cooks,' and ' Geber's kitchen,'
are frequent amongst those who at length
saw the error of their ways after wasting
their substance in the vain search for the elixir.

A longer interval might have elapsed but
for the voice of Peter the Hermit, whose
fanatical scheme for the recovery of the Holy
Sepulchre was the cause of that gradual
absorption, by the nations of the West, of the
learning which had so long been buried in the
East. The Crusaders, or those, rather, who
visited the shores of Syria under their protection
—the men whose skill in medicine and
letters rendered them useful to the invading
armies—acquired a knowledge of the Arabian
languages, and of the sciences cultivated by
Arabian philosophers, and this knowledge
they disseminated through Europe. Some
part of it, it is true, was derived from the
Moors in Spain, but it was all conveyed in a
common tongue which began now to be understood.
To this era belong the names of
Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile; of Isaac
Beimiram, the son of Solomon the physician;
of Hali Abbas, the scholar of Abimeher
Moyses, the son of Sejar; of Aben Sina,
better known as Avicenna, and sometimes
called Abohali; of Averroes of Cordova,
surnamed the Commentator; of Rasis, who is
also called Almanzor and Albumasar; and of
John of Damascus, whose name has been
latinised into Johannes Damascenus. All
these, physicians by profession, were more or
less professors of alchemy; and besides these
were such as Artephius, who wrote alchemical
tracts about the year 1130, but who deserves
rather to be remembered for the cool assertion
which he makes in his ' Wisdom of
Secrets ' that, at the time he wrote he had
reached the patriarchal—or fabulous—age of
one thousand and twenty-five years!

The thirteenth century came, and with it
came two men who stand first, as they then
stood alone, in literary and scientific knowledge.
One was a German, the other an
Englishman; the first was Albertus Magnus,
the last Roger Bacon.

Of the former, many wonderful stories
are told:—such, for instance, as his having
given a banquet to the King of the Romans,
in the gardens of his cloister at Cologne,
when he converted the intensity of winter
into a season of summer, full of flowers
and fruits, which disappeared when the
banquet was over; and his having constructed a
marvellous automaton, called ' Androïs,' which,
like the invention of his contemporary, Roger
Bacon, was said to be capable of auguring all
questions, past, present, and to come.

To know more than the rest of the world
in any respect, but particularly in natural
philosophy, was a certain method by which to
earn the name of necromancer in the middle
ages, and there are few whose occult fame has
stood higher than that of Roger Bacon. He,
was afraid, therefore, to speak plainly—indeed,
it was the custom of the early philosophers to
couch their knowledge in what Bacon himself
calls the ' tricks of obscurity; ' and in his celebrated
' Epistola de Secretis' he adverts to the
possibility of his being obliged to do the same
thing, through ' the greatness of the secrets which
he shall handle.' With regard to the invention
of his greatest secret, we shall give the words
in which he speaks of the properties of
gunpowder, and afterwards show in what terms
he concealed his knowledge. ' Noyses,' he
says, ' may be made in the aire like thunders,
yea, with greater horror than those that come
of nature; for a little matter fitted to the quantity
of a thimble, maketh a horrible noise and
wonderful lightning. And this is done after
sundry fashions, whereby any citie or armie
may be destroyed.' A more accurate description
of the explosion of gunpowder could scarcely be
given, and it is not to be supposed that Bacon
simply confined himself to the theory of his
art, when he knew so well the consequences
arising from a practical application of it. On
this head there is a legend extant, which has
not, to our knowledge, been printed before,
from which we may clearly see why he con-
tented himself with the cabalistic form in
which he conveyed his knowledge of what he
deemed a fatal secret.

Attached to Roger Bacon's laboratory, and
a zealous assistant in the manifold occupations
with which the learned Franciscan occupied
himself, was a youthful student, whose name
is stated to have been Hubert de Dreux. He
was a Norman, and many of the attributes of
that people were conspicuous in his character.
He was of a quick intelligence and hasty
courage, fertile in invention, and prompt in
action, eloquent of discourse, and ready of
hand; all excellent qualities, to which was
superadded an insatiable curiosity. Docile to
receive instruction, and apt to profit by it,
Hubert became a great favourite with the
philosopher, and to him Bacon expounded
many of the secrets-- or supposed secrets—of
the art which he strove to bring to perfection.
He instructed him also in the composition of
certain medicines, which Bacon himself
believed might be the means of prolonging life,
though not to the indefinite extent dreamt of