follow this custom, and have a very ingenious method of taking off the skins. The head of the goat, or sheep, is first removed; and while the body is yet warm, the hand is introduced beneath the skin of the neck, and worked round until the two forefeet are drawn out. The skin is then stripped off so as to be without a cut or mark on it, and this forms the leathern bag just described. The bottles mentioned in Scripture were of this sort, the use of glass being then unknown. So we read, that when Abraham sent Hagar away, he put a bottle of water upon her shoulder, and hence our Saviour's instruction not to put new wine into old bottles, meaning that the fermentation of the wine would, more readily, burst an old than a new bottle of this description. It is generally believed, that the skins of animals were the most ancient receptacles of all liquids, but more especially of wine and they were rendered water-tight by a coating of resinous, oily matter: it was the skin of a goat in which Ulysses carried a supply of wine presented to him by the priest of Apollo, when he visited the cavern of the Cyclops. The largest of these wine-bags, of which there is any account, was that exhibited at a feast given by Ptolemy Philadelphus, and drawn on a car 75 feet long by 42 feet broad: this bag was composed of panthers' skins, and contained 20,250 gallons. The modern Greeks convey their wines to different parts in leathern or skin bags, such as those used by the Spaniards and Portuguese for the same purpose; and they are preferred to every other sort of vessel in consequence of being more portable. It is the practice, in many parts of the East, in making such wine-bottles, to turn the hairy side of the skin inwards. To the Gauls, who settled on the banks of the Po, we are indebted for the useful invention of preserving wine in casks or vessels of wood.†

As chemistry may be said to have formed no part of the general knowledge of the ancient Greeks, it would be vain to look for any thing like distillation among them; for, although an ingenious and polished people, they do not appear to have been acquainted with that art. Medicine was much esteemed by them, but their pharmacopeia, until a late period, scarcely ever extended beyond the list of simples used by Hippocrates. Their early intercourse with the Egyptians made them familiar with the working of metals, but none of their writers anterior to Pliny, whose works have descended to us, shew that they were acquainted with the raising of steam or vapour to the same extent or in the manner described by that celebrated Roman.§

For a list of these simples, see Le Clerc's Hist. de la Med. part I. b. iii. cap. 23, § Vide page 11 of this work.

Dioscorides, who was physician to Cleopatra, and contemporary with Pliny, was obliged to collect essential oil on the fleece of a sheep, a proof that he knew no other mode of distillation. One hundred and thirty one years subsequent to this, Galen, a celebrated physician of Pergamus, who wrote many books not only upon medical, but philosophical subjects, speaks of distillation per descensum, but it is conceived he meant nothing more by this than what regarded the melting of metals.

Faber,* a writer in alchymy of some eminence, states that the art of distillation was known to Democritus, who was contemporary with Hippocrates, "primus enim inter Græcos distillandi peritus fuit Democritus distillationis autem peritiam didicit in Egypto," and that alchymy flourished in the time of Hermes Trismegistus, in Egypt, about A. M. 2434. He admits that neither Hippocrates nor Galen knew any thing of distillation; yet it appears extraordinary, that the most enlightened people on the earth should have remained ignorant of this art, 561 years after Democritus, unless it was kept a secret by him as well as by the Egyptians. In the 12th chapter and 20th verse of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, there is a metephorical allusion to the same practice, which is thus beautifully expressed by Parnell:

So artists melt the sullen ore of lead,
By heaping coals of fire upon its head;

In the kind warmth the metals learn to glow,
And free from dross the silver runs below.

In like manner, Caligula, according to Pliny, endeavoured to collect, by sublimation, gold from orpiment, a mineral substance found in different parts of the world.† Theophrastus and Dioscorides also describe the extraction of tar as effected by a similar process; and it is strange, that the same mode of obtaining it is still followed by the people of the northern provinces of Sweden.

During the reign of Dioclesian, who succeded Marcus Aurelius Numerianus, in the year 284, we find the Egyptians had carried their speculations in chemistry so far as to induce that emperor to publish an edict for the suppression of all the ancient books that treated of the art of making gold and silver, and which he wantonly committed to the flames, being fearful, that if they became wealthy, they would be induced to resist the Roman yoke, and set him at defiance. But

*

Faber wrote in 1627, and his works were printed at Strasburg in 1632. † Pliny, b. xxxiii. cap. 4.

‡ Vide Suidas in voce Xnuría, Gibbon, vol. ii. p. 137,

although this branch of speculative knowledge gave rise to many useful experiments, and was carried to a great height, we learn from the commentary on the second book of Aristotle's Meteors, written by Olympiodorus, a peripatetic philosopher, who flourished under the second Theodosius, that distillation was not then known, at least in a more improved state, than it was 400 years before; for he says, that "Sailors, when they labour under a scarcity of fresh water at sea, boil the sea-water, and suspend large sponges from the mouth of a brazen vessel, to imbibe what is evaporated, and in drawing this off from the sponges, they find it to be sweet water."

It is said that Zosimus, the Panopolite, who lived at the close of the 4th or beginning of the 5th century, has given some figures of a distilling apparatus, which Olaus Borrichius, the learned Danish professor, has exhibited in his Hermetis et Ægyptiorum Chemicorum Sapientia, p. 156. This Zosimus was the first who used the word chemia, which, in the Arabic language, signifies concealment, and from which Boerhaave and others derive the term chemistry, implying the hidden or occult science. Zosimus was a man of considerable attainments, he wrote twenty-four books of Imouth, or chemistry, addressed to his sister Theosebia. Most if not all, of these treatises are preserved in the king's library at Paris, but have not yet been translated. From the specimen and account, however, which Borrichius gives of them they seem to be mystical and enthusiastic.* Zosimus is of opinion, that both the name and science of chemistry existed before the flood: and there is certainly reason to believe, that as the arts had been cultivated by the antediluvians, that the ancient Chaldeans and Egyptians preserved traces of them, which were not obliterated when the philosophers and historians of Greece visited Africa and Asia; they are even discernible amidst the confusion of names, dates, and lapse of time, in spite of the clouds of fables with which they are enveloped. Hence it is not unlikely, that Vulcan and Tubal-Cain are the same person, since both were skilled in such works as required the operations of fire; and that Vul-can is but a corruption or contraction of Tubal-Cain, appears highly probable.

In tracing the etymology of the word chemistry, it seems to be derived from the name of the country in which it first had existence. Egypt is frequently denominated by the Hebrew writers the land of Cham; and Chami, or Chemi, was the name by which it was most generally known to the aborigines. Plutarch says, that Egypt was called Chemia, from the blackness of the soil. Cham in Hebrew signifies hot, Cham also signifies black; and Chemia,† but with an ain for the final

Boerhaave's Elementa Chemiæ.

† Valpy's Classical Journal, vol. xviii. p. 229, &c.

radical, signifies, in Chaldaic, fermentation.

From this reasoning, it is no stretch of inference to assume, as before hinted at, that the doctrine of fermentation was known even before the deluge, and there is therefore nothing extraordinary in Noah's having made wine, and subjecting himself to its influence.

Sometime previous to the period in which Zosimus lived, and for a series of years afterwards, chemistry was cultivated with great earnestness by several Grecian ecclesiastics, but their efforts and attentions were principally directed to the art of making gold and silver. In the meantime, medicine received considerable improvements from the labours of Oribasius, Actius, Alexander, Paulus, and others.

Distillation, it is related, was discovered in the Augustine age by a Grecian physician, who, while sitting at dinner, was suddenly called away to visit a patient, and found, on his return, that the cover which had been placed over a dish of vegetables was dripping with moisture evaporated from them. Perceiving that the moisture was an extract from the materials in the dish occasioned by heat, he is said to have directed his studies to the consequences that might result from experiments made on this principle, and ultimately arrived at the art of distillation; but this story rests on such slender testimony, that it is not entitled to more than this incidental notice. Some will have it, that the invention of distillation is much older, and ground their opinions on the circumstance of a chest having been found in the Alestine field, near Padua, in which, it is said, an urn was enclosed by Maximus Olybius, devoted as an offering or present to Pluto, containing two phials, most curiously wrought, the one of gold and the other of silver, both full of an exquisite liquor, which fed a burning lamp for many ages. Upon the chest was inscribed :—

This sacred gift to Pluto I forbid

A thief to touch, (for 'tis a secret hid),
With art and pains hath great Olybius pent
In this small chest the unruly element.

On the urn were the following couplets:

Begone, ye thieves, why dare you here to pry,
Depart from hence to your god Mercury;

Devoted to great Pluto, in this pitcher

Lies a grand gift, the world scarce knows a richer."

This legend, like the other respecting the origin of distillation, rests on authority equally trifling, and is one of those fanciful conceptions

Taylor's Antiquitates Curiosa.

of the alchymists, as preposterous as the touch of the philosopher's stone is extravagant. This reminds me of the allegory of the cup of Jemsheed, the supposed inventor of wine, which, the Persians say, was cut out of a ruby or carbuncle, and contains the elixir of life buried under the ruins of Istakhar.

While the Grecian physicians and ecclesiastics were busied in the pursuit of chemical knowledge, the Saracens, then an ignorant and barbarous race, headed by the Caliph Omar's general, Amru, possessed themselves of Alexandria, and, in the madness of their zeal, destroyed the famous library in that city; the Caliph assigning to his general as a reason, that if the books it contained agreed with the Koran, they were useless, and if they differed from it, they were pernicious, and ought to be destroyed. The loss of so vast an accumulation of human knowledge, not less than 700,000 volumes, which the Ptolomies laboured so long in collecting, must ever be lamented, as it deprived the world, in a great measure, of the discoveries and learning of the ancients, which would have served posterity in the paths of literature and the pursuits of science. The traveller, Ali Bey, felt this so sensibly, that, on visiting Alexandria, particularly the baths of Cleopatra, in that city, in the heating of which the library is said to have been consumed, exclaimed,-" Nothing, absolutely nothing, concerning those distant periods, is handed down for our instruction.-Oh! library of Alexandria! why art thou wanted! What an irreparable loss!-But I respect the decision of the caliph."* As the progress of their arms introduced the Saracens to a more general knowledge of other nations, a taste for civilization and the cultivation of literature, gradually, gained ground. Colleges and seminaries of education were erected and endowed, while learned and ingenious men were encouraged and sought after. Some of the Caliphs themselves excelled in the learning of the day. Almamun, in particular, who ascended the Moslem throne, in the 198th year of the Hegira, (813th of the Christian era,) had attained to great perfection in various branches of science. He not only employed learned men to translate the books he had purchased, at an enormous expense, from the Christians of various nations, but likewise promoted, by all possible means, the study of every branch of literature on which they were written, and even read them himself with an almost unparalleled ardour.

As might be expected, from the nature and pursuits of the nations from which the Saracens imbibed their taste for literature, alchymy and medicine became their favourite studies. The works on those