On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art Part 3

[Transcriber's Note: The listed symbols are included in the "images" directory accompanying the html version of this file.]

+ Denotes anything sharp, gnawing, or corrosive; as vinegar or fire: being supposed to be stuck around with barbed spikes.

? Denotes a perfect immutable simple body, such as gold, which has nothing acrimonious or heterogeneous adhering to it.

? Denotes half gold, whose inside, if turned outward, would make it entire gold, as having nothing foreign or corrosive in it; which the alchemists observe of silver.

? Denotes the inside to be pure gold, but the outer part of the colour of silver and a corrosive underneath, which, if taken away, would leave it mere gold, and this the adepts affirm of mercury.

? Denotes the chief part to be gold; whereto, however, adheres another large, crude, corrosive part, which, if removed, would leave the rest possessed with all the properties of gold, and this the adepts affirm of copper.

? Likewise denotes gold at the bottom, but attended with a great proportion of a sharp corrosive, sometimes amounting to a half of the whole, whence half the character expresses acrimony; which, accordingly, both alchemists and physicians observe of iron, and hence that common opinion of the adepts that the aurum vivum, or gold of the philosophers, is contained in iron, and that the universal medicine is rather to be sought in this metal than in gold itself.

? Denotes half the matter of tin to be silver, the other a crude corrosive acid, which is accordingly confirmed by the a.s.sayers; tin proving almost as fixed as silver in the cupel, and discovering a large quant.i.ty of crude sulphur well known to the alchemists.

? Denotes almost the whole to be corrosive, but retaining some resemblance with silver, which the artists very well know holds true of lead.

? Denotes a chaos--world, or one thing which includes all: this is the character of antimony, wherein is found gold, with plenty of an a.r.s.enical corrosive.

The symbols, or at least some of them, may be traced even in the Chinese characters for gold, silver, &c.

The connection of Egypt with India shortly after the Christian era is distinctly indicated in the works of Apuleius. He lived in the early part of the second century after Christ, and was educated first at Carthage, then renowned as a school of literature. He then travelled extensively in Greece, Asia, and Egypt, and became initiated into many religious fraternities and an adept in their mysteries. He was admitted a priest of the order of aesculapius, and describes the ceremony of the offering of the first-fruits by the priests of Isis, when the navigation opened in spring. The vessel, which was to be set adrift upon the ocean freighted with the offering, was splendidly decorated and covered with hieroglyphics, and after having been "_purified with a lighted torch, an egg, and sulphur_," was allowed to sail away into the unknown as a sacrifice to procure the safety of the convoy of ships which would soon after start upon their voyage. These rites were of great antiquity.

He speaks, in his first tale, of a witch who, by means of her magic charms, made not only her fellow-countrymen love her, but "_the Indians even_," and in his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, his robes "bore pictures of Indian serpents."

From what I have now laid before you, in what must necessarily be a very imperfect manner, you will see that there is good reason to believe that in the study of science and philosophy the Indian races were much in advance of the Western nations. The age of science amongst them is very great; we fail utterly in trying to find its beginning, unless we accept the tradition which ascribes to Menu, their great lawgiver (who is supposed to have been Noah), the saving of three out of the four divine books or Vedas from the deluge. This would carry us back to the Antediluvian times for the beginning of our investigations; but without taking any such extreme view of the subject we will find traces of science clearly marked out for us in the history of the Indian races.

The picture of the Brahmins, drawn by Apuleius in the second century, shows how little they have changed in historical times. He says:--

"The Indians are a populous nation of vast extent of territory, situated far from us to the east, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superst.i.tious Jews and the mercantile Nabathaeans; and the flowing robed Aracidae, and the Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians, rich in perfumes.

"Now, I do not so much admire the heaps of ivory of the Indians, their harvests of pepper, their bales of cinnamon, their tempered steel, their mines of silver, and their golden streams, nor that among them, the Ganges, the greatest of all rivers,

'Rolls like a monarch on his course, and pours His eastern waters through a hundred streams, Mingling with ocean by a hundred mouths,'

"nor that these Indians, though situated at the dawn of day, are yet of the colour of night, nor that among them, immense dragons fight with enormous elephants, with parity of danger to their mutual destruction, for they hold them enwrapped in their slippery folds, so that the elephants cannot disengage their legs or in any way extricate themselves from the scaly bonds of the tenacious dragons. They are forced to seek revenge from the fall of their own bulk and to crush their captors by the ma.s.s of their own bodies.

"There are amongst them various kinds of inhabitants. I will rather speak of the marvellous things of men than of those of nature.

"There is among them a race who know nothing but to tend cattle, hence they are called neatherds; there are races clever in trafficking with merchandise, and others stout in fight, whether with arrows, or hand to hand with swords.

"There is also among them a pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists.

"These I exceedingly admire, for they are men skilled not in propagating the vine, nor in grafting trees, nor in tilling the ground. They know not how to cultivate the fields, nor to wash gold, or to break horses, or to shear or feed sheep or goats.

"What is it, then, they know? One thing instead of all these. They _cultivate wisdom_, both the aged professors and the young students.

Nothing do I so much admire in them as that they hate torpor of mind and sloth."

This does not look as if the Indians had been unknown or unappreciated in the second century A.D.

Apuleius is not alone in his respect for the Brahmins. Many of the Greek writers speak of them under the names of Brahmins or Gymnosophists, but always with great respect.

Strabo states, on the authority of Megasthenes (who it will be remembered was Amba.s.sador from Persia, and lived for some years at Palibothra, about 307 B.C.), that "there were two cla.s.ses of philosophers or priests, the Brachmanes and the Germanes, but the Brachmanes are best esteemed." Towards the close of his account of the "Brachmanes" he says:--

"In many things they agree with the Greeks, for they affirm that the world was produced, and is perishable, and that it is spherical; that G.o.d, governing it as well as framing it, pervades the whole; that the principles of all things are various, but water is the principle of the construction of the world; that besides the four elements there is a fifth, nature--whence heaven and the stars; that the earth is placed in the centre of all.

"Such, and many other things are affirmed of reproduction and of the soul. Like Plato, they devise fables concerning the immortality of the soul, and the judgment in the infernal regions, and other similar notions. These things are said of the Brachmanes."

Clemens Alexandrinus, after saying that philosophy flourished in ancient times amongst the barbarians, and afterwards was introduced amongst the Greeks, instances the prophets of the Egyptians, the Chaldees of the a.s.syrians, the Druids of the Gauls (Galatae), the Samauaeans of the Bactrians, the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi of the Persians, and the Gymnosophists of the Indians. The Greek authors distinctly speak of the Brahmins as the chief of the castes or divisions of the Indian people from the time of Megasthenes, who wrote of them in the fourth century B.C.

Sir William Jones, in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that "the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation," and affirms that "much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may be found in the Vedas."

"That _most subtle spirit_ which he suspected to pervade natural bodies, and lying concealed in them, to cause attraction and repulsion, the emission, reflection and refraction of light, electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion, is described by the Hindus as a _fifth element_, endowed with these very powers; and the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly ascribe to the sun, thence called 'Aditya, or the attractor,' a name designed by the mythologists to mean the child of the G.o.ddess Aditi. But the most wonderful pa.s.sage on the theory of attractions occurs in the charming allegorical poem of 'Shi'ri'n and Ferhai'd, or the Divine Spirit, and a human soul disinterestedly pious,' a work which, from the first verse to the last, is a blaze of religious and poetical fire.

"The whole pa.s.sage appears to me so curious that I make no apology for giving you a faithful translation of it:--

"_There is a strong propensity which dances through every atom, and attracts the minutest particle to some peculiar object; search this universe from its base to its summit, from fire to air, from water to earth (the four elements!), from all below the moon to all above the celestial spheres, and thou wilt not find a corpuscle dest.i.tute of that natural attractability. The very point of the first thread in this apparently tangled skein is no other than such a principle of attraction, and all principles beside are void of a real basis: from such a propensity arises every motion perceived in heavenly or in terrestrial bodies; it is a disposition to be attracted which taught hard steel to rush from its place and rivet itself on the magnet; it is the same disposition which impels the light straw to attach itself firmly on amber; it is this quality which gives every substance in nature a tendency towards another, and an inclination forcibly directed to a determinate point._"

In Sir W. Ainslie's Materia Medica of India the opinion of an old Hindoo author is given as to the qualifications required in a physician.

"He must be a person of strict veracity, and of the greatest sobriety and decorum: he ought to be skilled in all the commentaries on the 'Ayur-Veda,' and be otherwise a man of sense and benevolence: his heart must be charitable, his temper calm, and his constant study how to do good.

"Such a man is properly called a good physician, and such a physician ought still daily to improve his mind by an attentive perusal of scientific books.

"Should death come upon us while under the care of a person of this description, it can only be considered as inevitable fate, and not the consequence of presumptuous ignorance."

The knowledge of the Hindoos may be all said to be contained in their sacred books called the Vedas, which, although perfect as a whole, are actually divided into four parts, each in itself const.i.tuting a separate Veda under a special t.i.tle. These are the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda (white and black), the Sama-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda, or Ayur-Veda.

Although the last is admitted to be as a whole not so ancient as the other three, still there are portions of it that are probably as old as any of the others. Even in the oldest epic poems of the Hindoos mention is made of four Vedas as already in existence and as of great antiquity.

Sir William Jones estimates the date of its compilation as certainly not after B.C. 1580.

These Vedas are considered by the Hindoos to contain the groundwork of all their philosophy, as well as of their arts and sciences, and they contain treatises on music, medicine, the art of war, and architecture.

Sir William Jones, in referring to the Ayur-Veda, says that, to his astonishment, he found in it an entire Upanishad on the internal parts of the human body, enumerating the nerves, veins, and arteries.

The Ayur-Veda was considered by the Brahmins to be the work of Brahma--by him it was communicated to Dacsha, the Praj.a.pati, and by him, the two Aswins, or sons of Surya--the sun--were instructed in it, and thus became the medical attendants of the G.o.ds. A legend that cannot but recall to our mind the Greek myth of the two sons of aesculapius and their descent from Apollo.

In the case of immortal G.o.ds the practice was confined to surgery, in treating the wounds received in the conflicts which were constantly described as occurring amongst the G.o.ds themselves, or between the G.o.ds and the demons. Of course they performed many miraculous cures, as would be expected from their superhuman character.

Professor Wilson published in the _Oriental Magazine_, in 1823, some notices on early Hindoo Medicine, and he points out that the tradition is, that the above "two Aswins instructed Indra in medical and surgical art, that Indra instructed Dahnwantari; although others make Atreya, Bharadwaja, and Charaka prior to the latter:--Charaka's work, which goes by his name, is extant. Dahnwantari is also styled Kasi-rajah, or Prince of Kasi, or Benares. His disciple was Susruta, his work also exists."

The Ayur-Veda, as the oldest medical writings of the Hindoos are collectively called, was divided into eight divisions. These are described by Professor Wilson as follows:--

"1st. _Salya._--The art of extracting extraneous substances, violently or accidentally introduced into the body, with the treatment of the inflammation and suppuration thereby induced.

"The word _Salya_ means a dart or arrow, and points clearly to the origin of this branch of Hindoo science.