to his
monastery, and had been discovered there after the splitting open of the
pillar by a bolt of lightning from heaven. It is the extension of this
tradition that has sometimes led to the assumption that Valentine lived
in an earlier century, some even going so far as to say that he, too,
like Roger Bacon, was a product of the thirteenth century. It seems
reasonably possible, however, to separate the traditional from what is
actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some idea at least of his
work, if not of the details of his life. The internal evidence from his
works enables the historian of science to place his writing within half
a century of the discovery of America.

One of the myths that have gathered around the name of Basil Valentine,
because it has become a commonplace in philology, has probably made him
more generally known than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the
most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of chemistry in use about
half a century ago, in the chapter on antimony, there was a story that
students, if I may judge from my own experience, never forgot. It was
said that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, was the discoverer
of this substance. After having experimented with it in a number of
ways, he threw some of it out of his laboratory one day when the swine
of the monastery, finding it, proceeded to gobble it up, together with
some other refuse. Just when they were finishing it, the monk discovered
what they were doing. He feared the worst from it, but took the occasion
to observe the effect upon the swine very carefully. He found that,
after a preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these swine
developed an enormous appetite, and became fatter than any of the
others. This seemed a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, ever
on the search for the practical, thought that he might use the remedy to
good purpose on the members of the community. Some of the monks in the
monastery were of rather frail health and delicate constitution, and
most of them were rather thin, and he thought that the putting on of a
little fat, provided it could be accomplished without infringement of
the rule, might be a good thing for them. Accordingly, he administered,
surreptitiously, some of the salts of antimony, with which he was
experimenting, in the food served to these monks. The result, however,
was not so favorable as in the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to
one, though les