The first historical report of an experiment in transmu-
tation has been handed down by Pliny the Elder .^ Caligula
was the experimenter. Hoping to allay the gold-hunger
which has not yet ceased to gnaw at the vitals of the sons
of Adam, he built a furnace, and caused a quantity of
orpiment to be calcined. The result did not come up to
his expectations; king's yellow (trisulphid of arsenic),
for all its deceptive glitter, did not prove to be ''pay-
gravel"; the outlay exceeded the intake, and the ruler who
made his horse consul of Rome was, nevertheless, sane
enough to withdraw his capital from a losing business. A
later emperor, Anastasius of Byzantium, sent the proto-
chemist, Johannes Isthmius, to end his fraudulent career
in the fortress of Petra. Pseudo-science, too, has its
''martyrs." But the tide of folly rose with the march of
time, and both in Prance and England, in the fifteenth

*M. Berthelot, Les Origines de VAlchimie, page 69,



OLD AND NEW ALCHEMY 253

century, the coinage was debased, with royal assent, by
claimants to the possession of the ** great secret."^

From the ** house of Saturn," where it still lingered, by
a belated association, in the verses of Firmicus Maternus
(fourth century a.d.), alchemy was early transferred to
the ** house of Mercury." This is a figurative way of say-
ing that quicksilver was substituted for lead as the sub-
stratum of its operations. The choice had originally fallen
upon lead, because of its aflBnity to silver— an affinity pos-
sibly of far-reaching import ; but it could not hold its own
against the new metal, spoken of by Theophrastus about
300 B.C. as ** liquid silver." An ideal recipient for the
** powder of projection," it very soon displaced every
other. It was not all-sufficing, but it was indispensable.
