for exciting the appetite, correcting the bile, curing gangrene, and dissolving stone. Its remarkable property of assisting nitric acid to dissolve gold was soon observed and was attributed to its penetrating power.
Tartar.
Tartarus was the mythological hell where the gods imprisoned and punished those who had offended them. Virgil represents it as surrounded by three walls and the river Phlegethon, whose waters were sulphur and pitch. Its entrance was protected by a tower wrapped in a cloud three times as black as the darkest night, a gate which the gods themselves could not break, and guarded by Cerberus.
There is nothing to associate this dismal place with the tartar of chemistry, except that in old books it is said that Paracelsus so named the product because it "produces oil, water, tincture, and salt, which burn the patient as Tartarus does." Paracelsus did not invent the name of tartar; it is found in many alchemical books long before his time. The earliest found use of it is in an alchemical work by Hortulcuus, an English alchemist of the eleventh century.
Paracelsus was writing about "tartarous diseases" ("De Morbis Tartareis"), those, that is, which resulted from the deposit of concretions. Stone, gravel, and gout were among these diseases of tartar, and evidently it was this morbid tartar which he associated with the legendary Tartarus. The word tartar, applied to the deposit from wine, is sometimes supposed to have descended from an Egyptian term, dardarot, meaning an eternal habitation, and etymologists generally prefer it as the origin of the name. If it was, the sense
