The Philosopher's Stone.

Cromwell Argus, Volume IV, Issue 168, 28 January 1873, Page 7

The Philosopher's Stone.

[Ei'om the Daily Telegraph.} Strange news comes to us from California. The philosopher's stone has reappeared, and, as in all the old stories, so now, it is " an unknown" who possesses the wonderful secret. It was from an unknown (iynotus quidam) that Van Helmont received one-fourth of a grain of the precious material with which he converted intogold eight ounces of quicksilver. It was from a " stranger" that Helvetius the sceptic obtained a fragment of the size of half a rape-seed, and therewith transmuted six drachms of lead into gold which stood the most searching test by the Warden of the Hague. At Prague, Count Von Russ, with the aid of one grain of a red powder, got again from an unknown, converted into pure gold two pounds and a half of quicksilver ; and so, too, Ernest Ludwig, Landsgrave of Hesse Darmstadt, took "from an unknown hand" a packet containing a red and white tincture, with directions for their use. Ducats were coined from the gold made from lead by this process, and from the silver was struck the Hesse Darmstadt dollars of 1717. "The unknown" —after a century and a half of inactivity—has once again appeared upon the scene. Early this spring "a plain-looking man" walked into a San Francisco bank and offered a bar of metal. The banker was sceptical. He smelt a new mine well " salted." But an assayer was called in, and the bar proved to be gold, "a thousand fine," and was accordingly changed at the mint for 8000 dollars in double eagles. At the end of the l week came a bigger bar. " It is gold !" cried th 3 bewildered banker ; " pure gold, like the first! Where did you get it ?" " I made it," quietly replied the "plain-looking" unknown. ''l made it myself." Need we finish the tale ? The unknown and the banker are now in partnership, Midas is to furnish the bullion. The banker is to invest it. And San Francisco—this looks a little "ugly" \ —is to become " the centre of all commercial i etcliangos and the great depository of the | world." San Francisco, in short, is to "chaw I up" London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Ma- | (kid, Hamburg, and Frankfort; and gold is j to b come a drug in the market. The prospect is, to say the least of it, apalling. The guinea purchases little enough as it is. And | if the value of our gold coinage is to be thus I depreciated by "unknown" strangers, the [ bondholders and annuitant-; of the Old World \ must look to themselves. We shall have, as I kt'l the Peruvians, golden cooling utensib, j railings, tiles, and pavements. We shall I make our girders of gold, and locomotives of I gold will run upon a golden permanent way. S Our streets will be paved with gold ; our gas, I our water, our sewerage will travel in golden I pipes ; and the cabman who has a twentyI guinea doublocn offered him will turn up his I n se in disgust, and ask his fare whether he I considers himself a gentleman. A bad day will it be 'or those who hold securities, and ■ ■wlio'.-avepubcmt their money up m interest. Like t ;i e Wandering Jew, tue Alchemist ape rs and reappears at s'at.'d intervals. It is 30 long since we have seen him, that Ave I w.'lc une this advent with joy, even although I he shows himself as a "plain koking man" | who wants to deposit 8000 dollars at a San I Francisco bank. There is rothin ;■ so imposI able in Alchemy, after all, and the ideas of I t ie old alchemists, Albertus Magnus, Jacob g Bhnie, V;:n Helmont, and their fellows, j vug far from bang so wild as they might at 5 first appear. Their own notion was simple i enough, and peculiarly logical and reasonable. I They held copper and iron " pyrites" to be ' elementary bodies. Now, if you roast copper : pyntes you transmute it into copper. So I you transmute iron pyrites into iron, and ;. gilenea or "glance" into lead. Why, then, ; should you not roast a little more, and change Lit into gold. "Does not yeast," asked Bipi pal, " change the juice of plants, or a solution of sugar, by a new arrangement of their particles, into the youth giving and invigo- \ rating aqua tike ; does it not effect the expulI sum of a 1 impurities ; does not a ferment I (sour dough) convert flour into nourishing | bread i" Why then should we not find a I great ferment of all ferments, the raw mateI rial, the virgin of Adamic earth ? This once I obtained, all else is child's play. From the I vutieries prima, cruda, or remota will come \ the mercury of the adepts, the quintessence of metalhcity. To this add virgin of gold, I and the whole is put to hatch in an incubaIs tory. Thence comes the caput corvi or raven's head," which, after long exposure : wheat, is transmitted into the aVms cxjgnm, J or "white swan." After this has been yet | more fiercely heated it turns yellow and • ">% bright red. At last we have the "red \ ton;'' and now the work of transmutation is at I an end, and at the bottom of the crucible is I tte philosopher's stone itself, the great magisI wittm, the elixir, the red tincture, which I changes every metal to gold, cures all diseases, i youth to the exhausted frame of age, J ana prolongs life indefinitely. Why should | *e sneer at those who held this to be possible? D[ > we not ourselves fix the sun's rays on Paper, and utilise the very lightning as a fvnmmonaire ? Can wo not—the process is «Ued eleetrotyping— melt copper or silver in WW,water and cast it into statues ? Can we '»)u '3eze water, or oven mercury, in the i , j-art of a white-hot crucible ? Can we without either fire or flame, illuminate we cities ? Ultran a due was once as pre- ,: «s as g,,ld itself. We can now make ultrajwine by the ton ; and we hold it quite posJ <« that to-morrow the same magic which gablesi us to convert foul gas-tar into the most will also enable us to produce °<na bit of rough coke a diamond of the "nest water, and from the refuse of oil-works trt ose most precious and invaluable of all

drugs, quinine and morphia. When Liebig wrote in 1851, he predicted that we should "one day extract; from tar the glorious colouring principle of madder." Twenty years has passed and the thing has been done. Mauve and magenta are triumps of chemistry as wonderful as the discovery of the elixir vitce itself. And, in truth, the search for the philosopher's stone was little else than the search for the science of chemistry. The alchemists were the first chemists ; nor have we any right to ridicule the old "makers of gold." In the place of the red lion we now seek for Nature's laws. Every discovery opens to us a wider and a richer field. The end of all Science, the regmim hominis, is but, as Bacon saw, the knowledge of Nature. And to know Nature we must do as did the old alchemists —wring her secrets from her by the aid of furnace and crucible, retort and alembic. We still, in effect, search for the "virgin earth" of Geber ; nor will our searches ever see their end. The secret of wealth is the discovery of force. We want- as Bacon puts it in a hundred different ways—to make nature do man's work. Wind-mills and watermills were in their day as precious discoveries as man's heart could desire. Then we found out how to make steam labour for us. We caught the Titan ; we made him toil for our comfort in a thousand ways ; we put him in the prison-house, as the Philistines did Samson, and made him grind. We have burnt up oeon upon seon of bottled sunshine, turned it into steam, and with the steam have mined, have crossed the ocean, have bridged rivers, have done all our thousand and one tasks. Now we are reaching the end of our coal. We must seek elsewhere fresh supplies of force. Our bottled sunshine will soon be exhausted, and we must go back to the sun itself, the great life-giver, the centre of heat, j and strength, and growth. Titan himself j must work for us. And here we are, in truth, upon the verge of a discovery as compared with which the wildest dreams of Alchemy were as nothing. Is there no way of economising the sun's heat ? The greenhouse, of course, is a familiar and simple step towards the solution of the great problem. We all know that the heat gets into the greenhouse through the glass, and do all it can, it cannot get out again ; that were England covered with glass from Land's End to John o' Groat's, we should reproduce here, in the north-east corner of the wild Atlantic, the rich, glorious vegetation of the Tropics. But there is a yet further step which Science has made, and which leaves the greenhouse as far behind as the steam-engine leaves behind it the waterwheel or the windmill. Is it true Ave can split the sunlight into two parts—that we can filter it through a plate of coloured glass, and so extract from it the great magidenum, the principle of life and growth ? Photographers do as much every day. The yellow rays are valueless. They are but so much dross and clog. It is tl e pmple rays which are the direct excitants o c all chemical action. Why, then, should we not bottle these purple rays as we bottle lightning 1 A single Leyden battery can hold a flash which, if allowed !o spend itself, would rend down the pyramids, and scatter London in ruins. Why should not a single jar hold purple light enough to grow a pine forest in a year—to enable the farmer to breed beas's in one-third the time r - quired at present for normal and ordinary growth ? As it is, nine-tenths of the strevgt.ii of the great sun is vrasted. His heat falls upon the earth, and radiates off again into space. Here, then, is our philosopher's stone. In our coal beds lay dormant the ac--1 cumulated sunshine of centuries, These J burnt up, we must economise sunshine for ourselves. So shall we increase the fertility of our fields and ensure tie prosperity of additional millions of mankind. So, where of old grew one grain, shall grow seventy. So shall the rich crust of the earth be changed ' into a thousand useful products, which commerce shall molt down into wealth. So, perhaps, in the fulness of time shall we find the [ elixir vitce, and learn how to cure d'seases and i prolong life.