whom so many wonderful discoveries and inventions have been ascribed, had deep faith in the virtues of potable gold. Bacon, in a communication to Pope Nicolas IV, informs his Holiness of an old man who found some yellow liquor in a golden flask, when plowing one day in Sicily. Supposing it to be dew, he drank it off, and was immediately transformed into a hale, robust, and highly accomplished youth. Having abandoned his day-laboring he was admitted to the service of the King of Sicily, and served the court eighty years.
The belief in a life-prolonging elixir, sometimes claimed of the tincture of gold and sometimes of secret preparations, prevailed for centuries. Even so great a philosopher as Descartes believed he had attained the art of living a few hundred years; this belief was shared by some of his friends, and when he died before reaching sixty years they were convinced that he had been poisoned.
The alchemist Raymond Lully a contemporary of Friar Bacon, also experienced the restorative effect of this fountain of youth, if we can credit the statement in the curious verses of Sir George Ripley, composed in 1471:
"An Oyle is drawne owte in colour of Gold,
Or lyke thereto out of our fire Red Lead,
"Whych Raymond sayd when he was old,
Much more than Gold wold stand hym in stede.
For when he was for age nygh dede,
He made thereof Aurum Potabile
Whych hym revyvyd as men myght see."
(Compound of Alchymie.)
Oswald Croll, a German physician of the sixteenth century, wrote in 1609 in praise of gold as a medicine. I quote the English translation of his Basilica chymica, published at London in 1670:
"It is the principle part of a Physician that would Cure the Sick, first to comfort the Heart, and afterwards assault the Disease. Those to whom the harmonious Analogy of Superiours and Inferiours hath been known, and who from Suffrages of Astrologers have learned that to the two greatest Lights of Heaven, the two principle parts of Man, viz: the Heart and Brain, in things of Nature latently rests in Gold. . . . For Nature hath endowed Gold with no contemptible virtues, which who so knows how to draw out, and by ingenious Artifice is able rightly to use, he will find Gold, which seemed dead and barren, so lively and pregnant that it germinates and of itself progenerates new Gold. . . . Whence the true Philosophers have exquisitely prepared a wonderful and greatly to be desired Medicine with which the impurities of imperfect metals are removed and all vices of affects in uncurable Diseases of Humane Bodies perfectly exterminated."
