w, some of the monks in the monastery were of rather frail health
and delicate constitution, {59} and he thought that the putting on of
a little fat in their case might be a good thing. 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 less authentic, version of the story,
some of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of the experiment,
even 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. [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on
which some of these old stories that must now be rejected, are
founded. I have come upon the story with regard to Basil Valentine
and the antimony and the monks in an old French medical encyclopedia
of biography, published in the seventeenth century, and at that time
there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. How much older
than this it may be I do not know, though it is probable that it
comes from the sixteenth century, when the _kakoethes scribendi_
attacked many people because of the facility of printing, and when
most of the good stories that have so worried the modern dry-as-dust
historian in his researches for their correction became a part of
the body of supposed historical tradition.]

{60}

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