ures ought to be moved towards metals, if ever they
be admitted by them into true friendship, and by love, which
permeates the inmost parts, be converted into a better state."

The application of the figure at the end of his long digression is
characteristic of the period in which he wrote, as also to a
considerable extent of the German literary methods of the time.

In this volume on the use of antimony there are in most of the editions
certain biographical notes which have sometimes been accepted as
authentic, but oftener rejected. According to these, Basil Valentine was
born in a town in Alsace, on the southern bank of the Rhine. As a
consequence of this, there are several towns that have laid claim to
being his birthplace. M. Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French
philosophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, once
said that Basil Valentine, like Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim
him years after his death. He also suggested that, like those old poets,
it was possible that the writings sometimes attributed to Basil
Valentine were really the work not of one man, but of several
individuals. There are, however, many objections to this theory, the
most forcible of which is the internal evidence derived from the books
themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects
too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived
at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had
come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national
epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to
be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that
period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the idea of single
authorship for these works, and the same conclusion has been generally
come to with regard to the writings attributed to Basil Valentine.

Other biographic details contained in "The Triumphal Chariot of
Antimony" are undoubtedly more correct. According to them Basil
Valentine travelled in England and Holland on missions for his order,
and went through France and Spain on a pilgrimage to St. James of
Compostella.

Besides this work, there is a number of other books of Basil
Valentine's, printed during the first half of the sixteenth century,
that are well known and copies of which may be found in most of the
important libraries. The United States Surgeon General's Library at
Wa