last for ever. Rich people no longer bought the flowers to keep them in
their gardens, but to sell them again at cent per cent profit. It was seen
that somebody must lose fearfully in the end. As this conviction spread,
prices fell, and never rose again. Confidence was destroyed, and a
universal panic seized upon the dealers. _A_ had agreed to purchase ten
_Semper Augustines_ from _B_, at four thousand florins each, at six weeks
after the signing of the contract. _B_ was ready with the flowers at the
appointed time; but the price had fallen to three or four hundred florins,
and _A_ refused either to pay the difference or receive the tulips.
Defaulters were announced day after day in all the towns of Holland.
Hundreds who, a few months previously, had begun to doubt that there was
such a thing as poverty in the land, suddenly found themselves the
possessors of a few bulbs, which nobody would buy, even though they
offered them at one quarter of the sums they had paid for them. The cry of
distress resounded every where, and each man accused his neighbour. The
few who had contrived to enrich themselves hid their wealth from the
knowledge of their fellow-citizens, and invested it in the English or
other funds. Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler
walks of life, were cast back into their original obscurity. Substantial
merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a
noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.
When the first alarm subsided, the tulip-holders in the several towns held
public meetings to devise what measures, were best to be taken to restore
public credit. It was generally agreed, that deputies should be sent from
all parts to Amsterdam, to consult with the government upon some remedy
for the evil. The government at first refused to interfere, but advised
the tulip-holders to agree to some plan among themselves. Several meetings
were held for this purpose; but no measure could be devised likely to give
satisfaction to the deluded people, or repair even a slight portion of the
mischief that had been done. The language of complaint and reproach was in
every body's mouth, and all the meetings were of the most stormy
character. At last, however, after much bickering and ill-will, it was
agreed, at Amsterdam, by the assembled deputies, that all contracts made
in the height of the mania, or prior to the month of November 1636, should
be declared null and void, and that, in those made after that date,
purchasers should be freed from their engagements, on paying ten per cent
to the vendor. This decision gave no satisfaction. The vendors who had
their tulips on hand were, of course, discontented, and those who had
pledged themselves to purchase, thought themselves hardly treated. Tulips
which had, at one time, been worth six thousand florins, were now to be
procured for five hundred; so that the composition of ten per cent was one
hundred florins more than the actual value. Actions for breach of contract
were threatened in all the courts of the country; but the latter refused
to take cognisance of gambling transactions.
The matter was finally referred to the Provincial Council at the Hague,
and it was confidently expected that the wisdom of this body would invent
some measure by which credit should be restored. Expectation was on the
stretch for its decision, but it never came. The members continued to
deliberate week after week, and at last, after thinking about it for three
months, declared that they could offer no final decision until they had
more information. They advised, however, that, in the mean time, every
vendor should, in the presence of witnesses, offer the tulips _in natura_
to the purchaser for the sums agreed upon. If the latter refused to take
them, they might be put up for sale by public auction, and the original
contractor held responsible for the difference between the actual and the
stipulated price. This was exactly the plan recommended by the deputies,
and which was already shewn to be of no avail. There was no court in
Holland which would enforce payment. The question was raised in Amsterdam,
but the judges unanimously refused to interfere, on the ground that debts
contracted in gambling were no debts in law.
Thus the matter rested. To find a remedy was beyond the power of the
government. Those who were unlucky enough to have had stores of tulips on
hand at the time of the sudden reaction were left to bear their ruin as
philosophically as they could; those who had made profits were allowed to
keep them; but the commerce of the country suffered a severe shock, from
which it was many years ere it recovered.
The example of the Dutch was imitated to some extent in England. In the
year 1636 tulips were publicly sold in the Exchange of London, and the
jobbers exerted themselves to the utmost to raise them to the fictitious
value they had acquired in Amsterdam. In Paris also the jobbers strove to
create a tulipomania. In both cities they only partially succeeded.
However, the force of example brought the flowers into great favour, and
amongst a certain class of people tulips have ever since been prized more
highly than any other flowers of the field. The Dutch are still notorious
for their partiality to them, and continue to pay higher prices for them
than any other people. As the rich Englishman boasts of his fine
race-horses or his old pictures, so does the wealthy Dutchman vaunt him of
his tulips.
In England, in our day, strange as it may appear, a tulip will produce
more money than an oak. If one could be found, _rara in terris_, and black
as the black swan of Juvenal, its price would equal that of a dozen acres
of standing corn. In Scotland, towards the close of the seventeenth
century, the highest price for tulips, according to the authority of a
writer in the supplement to the third edition of the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, was ten guineas. Their value appears to have diminished from
that time till the year 1769, when the two most valuable species in
England were the _Don Quevedo_ and the _Valentinier_, the former of which
was worth two guineas and the latter two guineas and a half. These prices
appear to have been the minimum. In the year 1800, a common price was
fifteen guineas for a single bulb. In 1835, a bulb of the species called
the Miss Fanny Kemble was sold by public auction in London for
seventy-five pounds. Still more remarkable was the price of a tulip in the
possession of a gardener in the King's Road, Chelsea;--in his catalogues
it was labelled at two hundred guineas.
[Illustration]
THE ALCHYMISTS;
or
Searchers for the Philosopher's Stone and the Water of Life.
_Mercury_ (_loquitur_). The mischief a secret any of them know,
above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! howsoever
they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold,
Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and
treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that
creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their
crude and their sublimate, their precipitate and their unctions;
their male and their female, sometimes their hermaphrodite--what
they list to style me! They will calcine you a grave matron, as it
might be a mother of the maids, and spring up a young virgin out
of her ashes, as fresh as a phoenix; lay you an old courtier on
the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have
broiled him enough, blow a soul into him with a pair of bellows!
See, they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against
me! The genius of the place defend me!--BEN JONSON'S _Masque:
Mercury vindicated from the Alchymists_.
Dissatisfaction with his lot seems to be the characteristic of man in all
ages and climates. So far, however, from being an evil, as at first might
be supposed, it has been the great civiliser of our race; and has tended,
more than any thing else, to raise us above the condition of the brutes.
But the same discontent which has been the source of all improvement, has
been the parent of no small progeny of follies and absurdities; to trace
these latter is our present object. Vast as the subject appears, it is
easily reducible within such limits as will make it comprehensive without
being wearisome, and render its study both instructive and amusing.
Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by
impelling us to seek for remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us
in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and ignorance of
the future--the doom of man upon this sphere, and for which he shews his
antipathy by his love of life, his longing for abundance, and his craving
curiosity to pierce the secrets of the days to come. The first has led
many to imagine that they might find means to avoid death, or failing in
this, that they might, nevertheless, so prolong existence as to reckon it
by centuries instead of units. From this sprang the search, so long
continued and still pursued, for the _elixir vitæ_, or _water of life_,
which has led thousands to pretend to it and millions to believe in it.
From the second sprang the search for the philosopher's stone, which was
to create plenty by changing all metals into gold; and from the third, the
false sciences of astrology, divination, and their divisions of
necromancy, chiromancy, augury, with all their train of signs, portents,
and omens.
In tracing the career of the erring philosophers, or the wilful cheats,
who have encouraged or preyed upon the credulity of mankind, it will
simplify and elucidate the subject, if we divide it into three classes:
the first comprising alchymists, or those in general who have devoted
themselves to the discovering of the philosopher's stone and the water of
life; the second comprising astrologers, necromancers, sorcerers,
geomancers, and all those who pretended to discover futurity; and the
third consisting of the dealers in charms, amulets, philters,
universal-panacea mongers, touchers for the evil, seventh sons of a
seventh son, sympathetic powder compounders, homoeopathists, animal
magnetisers, and all the motley tribe of quacks, empirics, and charlatans.
But in narrating the career of such men, it will be found that many of
them united several or all of the functions just mentioned; that the
alchymist was a fortune-teller, or a necromancer--that he pretended to
cure all maladies by touch or charm, and to work miracles of every kind.
In the dark and early ages of European history this is more especially the
case. Even as we advance to more recent periods, we shall find great
difficulty in separating the characters. The alchymist seldom confined
himself strictly to his pretended science--the sorcerer and necromancer to
theirs, or the medical charlatan to his. Beginning with alchymy, some
confusion of these classes is unavoidable; but the ground will clear for
us as we advance.
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt
from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which
great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be
uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his
youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that
swayed his actions at that time, that he may wonder at them; so should
society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed the
ages fled. He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to
hear of them merely because they are absurd. No man is so wise but that he
may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action;
and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement
from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity. And not only is such
a study instructive: he who reads for amusement only will find no chapter
in the annals of the human mind more amusing than this. It opens out the
whole realm of fiction--the wild, the fantastic, and the wonderful, and
all the immense variety of things "that are not, and cannot be; but that
have been imagined and believed."
* * * * *
For more than a thousand years the art of alchymy captivated many noble
spirits, and was believed in by millions. Its origin is involved in
obscurity. Some of its devotees have claimed for it an antiquity coeval
with the creation of man himself, others, again, would trace it no further
back than the time of Noah. Vincent de Beauvais argues, indeed, that all
the antediluvians must have possessed a knowledge of alchymy; and
particularly cites Noah as having been acquainted with the _elixir vitæ_,
or he could not have lived to so prodigious an age, and have begotten
children when upwards of five hundred. Lenglet du Fresnoy, in his _History
of the Hermetic Philosophy_, says, "Most of them pretended that Shem, or
Chem, the son of Noah, was an adept in the art, and thought it highly
probable that the words _chemistry_ and _alchymy_ are both derived from
his name." Others say, the art was derived from the Egyptians, amongst
whom it was first founded by Hermes Trismegistus. Moses, who is looked
upon as a first-rate alchymist, gained his knowledge in Egypt; but he kept
it all to himself, and would not instruct the children of Israel in its
mysteries. All the writers upon alchymy triumphantly cite the story of the
golden calf, in the 32d chapter of Exodus, to prove that this great
lawgiver was an adept, and could make or unmake gold at his pleasure. It
is recorded, that Moses was so wrath with the Israelites for their
idolatry, "that he took the calf which they had made, and burned it in the
fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the
children of Israel drink of it." This, say the alchymists, he never could
have done had he not been in possession of the philosopher's stone; by no
other means could he have made the powder of gold float upon the water.
But we must leave this knotty point for the consideration of the adepts in
the art, if any such there be, and come to more modern periods of its
history. The Jesuit, Father Martini, in his _Historia Sinica_, says, it
was practised by the Chinese two thousand five hundred years before the
birth of Christ; but his assertion, being unsupported, is worth nothing.
It would appear, however, that pretenders to the art of making gold and
silver existed in Rome in the first centuries after the Christian era, and
that, when discovered, they were liable to punishment as knaves and
impostors. At Constantinople, in the fourth century, the transmutation of
metals was very generally believed in, and many of the Greek ecclesiastics
wrote treatises upon the subject. Their names are preserved, and some
notice of their works given, in the third volume of Langlet du Fresnoy's
_History of the Hermetic Philosophy_. Their notion appears to have been,
that all metals were composed of two substances; the one, metallic earth;
and the other, a red inflammable matter, which they called sulphur. The
pure union of these substances formed gold; but other metals were mixed
with and contaminated by various foreign ingredients. The object of the
philosopher's stone was to dissolve or neutralise all these ingredients,
by which iron, lead, copper, and all metals would be transmuted into the
original gold. Many learned and clever men wasted their time, their
health, and their energies, in this vain pursuit; but for several
centuries it took no great hold upon the imagination of the people. The
history of the delusion appears, in a manner, lost from this time till the
eighth century, when it appeared amongst the Arabians. From this period it
becomes easier to trace its progress. A master then appeared, who was long
looked upon as the father of the science, and whose name is indissolubly
connected with it.
GEBER.
Of this philosopher, who devoted his life to the study of alchymy, but few
particulars are known. He is thought to have lived in the year 730. His
true name was Abou Moussah Djafar, to which was added Al Sofi, or "The
Wise," and he was born at Houran, in Mesopotamia.[28] Some have thought
he was a Greek, others a Spaniard, and others a prince of Hindostan; but
of all the mistakes which have been made respecting him, the most
ludicrous was that made by the French translator of Sprenger's _History of
Medicine_, who thought, from the sound of his name, that he was a German,
and rendered it as the "Donnateur," or Giver. No details of his life are
known; but it is asserted, that he wrote more than five hundred works upon
the philosopher's stone and the water of life. He was a great enthusiast
in his art, and compared the incredulous to little children shut up in a
narrow room, without windows or aperture, who, because they saw nothing
beyond, denied the existence of the great globe itself. He thought that a
preparation of gold would cure all maladies, not only in man, but in the
inferior animals and plants. He also imagined that all the metals laboured
under disease, with the exception of gold, which was the only one in
perfect health. He affirmed, that the secret of the philosopher's stone
had been more than once discovered; but that the ancient and wise men who
had hit upon it would never, by word or writing, communicate it to men,
because of their unworthiness and incredulity.[29] But the life of Geber,
though spent in the pursuit of this vain chimera, was not altogether
useless. He stumbled upon discoveries which he did not seek; and science
is indebted to him for the first mention of corrosive sublimate, the red
oxide of mercury, nitric acid, and the nitrate of silver.[30]
[28] _Biographie Universelle_.
[29] His sum "of perfection," or instructions to students to aid
them in the laborious search for the stone and elixir, has
been translated into most of the languages of Europe. An
English translation, by a great enthusiast in alchymy, one
Richard Russell, was published in London in 1686. The preface
is dated eight years previously from the house of the
alchymist, "at the Star, in Newmarket, in Wapping, near the
Dock." His design in undertaking the translation was, as he
informs us, to expose the false pretences of the many
ignorant pretenders to the science who abounded in his day.
[30] Article, Geber, _Biographie Universelle_.
For more than two hundred years after the death of Geber, the Arabian
philosophers devoted themselves to the study of alchymy, joining with it
that of astrology. Of these the most celebrated was
ALFARABI.
Alfarabi flourished at the commencement of the tenth century, and enjoyed
the reputation of being one of the most learned men of his age. He spent
his life in travelling from country to country, that he might gather the
opinions of philosophers upon the great secrets of nature. No danger
dismayed him; no toil wearied him of the pursuit. Many sovereigns
endeavoured to retain him at their courts; but he refused to rest until he
had discovered the great object of his life--the art of preserving it for
centuries, and of making gold as much as he needed. This wandering mode of
life at last proved fatal to him. He had been on a visit to Mecca, not so
much for religious as for philosophical purposes, when, returning through
Syria, he stopped at the court of the Sultan Seifeddoulet, who was
renowned as the patron of learning. He presented himself in his travelling
attire in the presence of that monarch and his courtiers; and, without
invitation, coolly sat himself down on the sofa beside the prince. The
courtiers and wise men were indignant; and the sultan, who did not know
the intruder, was at first inclined to follow their example. He turned to
one of his officers, and ordered him to eject the presumptuous stranger
from the room; but Alfarabi, without moving, dared them to lay hands upon
him; and, turning himself calmly to the prince, remarked, that he did not
know who was his guest, or he would treat him with honour, not with
violence. The sultan, instead of being still further incensed, as many
potentates would have been, admired his coolness; and, requesting him to
sit still closer to him on the sofa, entered into a long conversation with
him upon science and divine philosophy. All the court were charmed with
the stranger. Questions for discussion were propounded, on all of which he
shewed superior knowledge. He convinced every one who ventured to dispute
with him; and spoke so eloquently upon the science of alchymy, that he was
at once recognised as only second to the great Geber himself. One of the
doctors present inquired whether a man who knew so many sciences was
acquainted with music? Alfarabi made no reply, but merely requested that a
lute should be brought him. The lute was brought; and he played such
ravishing and tender melodies, that all the court were melted into tears.
He then changed his theme, and played airs so sprightly, that he set the
grave philosophers, sultan and all, dancing as fast as their legs could
carry them. He then sobered them again by a mournful strain, and made them
sob and sigh as if broken-hearted. The sultan, highly delighted with his
powers, entreated him to stay, offering him every inducement that wealth,
power, and dignity could supply; but the alchymist resolutely refused, it
being decreed, he said, that he should never repose till he had discovered
the philosopher's stone. He set out accordingly the same evening, and was
murdered by some thieves in the deserts of Syria. His biographers give no
further particulars of his life beyond mentioning that he wrote several
valuable treatises on his art, all of which, however, have been lost. His
death happened in the year 954.
AVICENNA.
Avicenna, whose real name was Ebn Cinna, another great alchymist, was born
at Bokhara in 980. His reputation as a physician and a man skilled in all
sciences was so great, that the Sultan Magdal Douleth resolved to try his
powers in the great science of government. He was accordingly made Grand
Vizier of that prince, and ruled the state with some advantage; but in a
science still more difficult, he failed completely. He could not rule his
own passions, but gave himself up to wine and women, and led a life of
shameless debauchery. Amid the multifarious pursuits of business and
pleasure, he nevertheless found time to write seven treatises upon the
philosopher's stone, which were for many ages looked upon as of great
value by pretenders to the art. It is rare that an eminent physician as
Avicenna appears to have been, abandons himself to sensual gratification;
but so completely did he become enthralled in the course of a few years,
that he was dismissed from his high office, and died shortly afterwards of
premature old age and a complication of maladies, brought on by
debauchery. His death took place in the year 1036. After his time few
philosophers of any note in Arabia are heard of as devoting themselves to
the study of alchymy; but it began shortly afterwards to attract greater
attention in Europe. Learned men in France, England, Spain, and Italy,
expressed their belief in the science, and many devoted their whole
energies to it. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries especially, it was
extensively pursued, and some of the brightest names of that age are
connected with it. Among the most eminent of them are
ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THOMAS AQUINAS.