bservations of
special practical utility. His studies in antimony were made mainly with
the idea of showing how that substance might be used in medicine. He did
not neglect to point out other possible uses, however, and knew the
secret of the employment of antimony in order to give sharpness and
definition to the impression produced by metal types. It would seem as
though he was the first scientist who discussed this subject, and there
is even some question of whether printers and typefounders did not
derive their ideas in this matter from our chemist.

Interested though he was in the transmutation of metals, he never failed
to try to find and suggest some medicinal use for all of the substances
that he investigated. His was no greedy search for gold and no
cumulation of investigations with the idea of benefiting only himself.
Mankind was always in his mind, and perhaps there is no better
demonstration of his fulfilment of the character of the monk than this
constant solicitude to benefit others by every bit of investigation that
he carried out. For him, with medieval nobleness of spirit, "the first
part of every work must be the invocation of God, and the last, though
no less important than the first, must be the utility and fruit for
mankind that can be derived from it."

The career of the last of the Makers of Medicine in the Middle Ages may
be summed up briefly in a few sentences that show how thoroughly this
old Benedictine was possessed of the spirit of modern science. He
believed in observation as the most important source of medical
knowledge. He valued clinical experience far above book information. He
insisted on personal acquaintanceship on the part of the physician with
the drugs he used, and thought nothing more unworthy of a practitioner
of medicine,--indeed he sets it down as almost criminal--than to give
remedies of whose composition he was not well aware and whose effect he
did not thoroughly understand. He thought that nature was the most
important aid to the physician, much more important than drugs, though
he was the first to realize the significance of chemical affinities, and
he seems to have understood rather well how individual often were the
effects obtained from drugs. He was a patient student, a faithful
observer, a writer who did not begrudge time and care to the composition
of large books on medicine, yet withal he was no dry-as-dust scholar,
but eminently human in his sympathies with ailin