s authentic, version of the story, some of the poor
monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment, perished as the
result of the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. According to the
better version, they suffered only the usual unpleasant consequences of
taking antimony, which are, however, quite enough for a fitting climax
to the story. Basil Valentine called the new substance which he had
discovered antimony, that is, _opposed to monks_. It might be good for
hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, as it were.[30]

Unfortunately for most of the good stories of history, modern criticism
has nearly always failed to find any authentic basis for them, and they
have had to go the way of the legends of Washington's hatchet and Tell's
apple. We are sorry to say that that seems to be true also of this
particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from
certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is
no more derived from _anti_ and _monachus_ than it is from _anti_ and
_monos_ (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation
that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to
consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone in
nature.

Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are
associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that
Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly
designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses, who,
working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable
humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. There
are definite historical grounds for placing Basil Valentine as the first
of the series of careful observers who differentiated chemistry from the
old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of information to the
uses of medicine. It is said to have been because of the study of Basil
Valentine's work that Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic traditions,
so supreme in medicine up to his time, and began our modern
pharmaceutics. Following Paracelsus came Van Helmont, the father of
modern medical chemistry, and these three did more than any others to
enlarge the scope of medication and to make observation rather than
authority the most important criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the
work of this trio of men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the
Renaissance in medicine as in ar