My Library

and health—that wonderful chemic which purifies the juices, removes obstructions, clarifies the fluids, and renders man physically invulnerable to miasmas and disease—to all things destructive to life, except, of course, material injury. What d’ye think of that? Ha! ha!’ and again he burst out in a roaring squeak: “ ‘I’ll discover the centre of gravity, You’ll find out the Philosophers’ stone.’ “It has been the habit of the wiseacres of this world to deride the idea that it is possible to make gold; to laugh in face of the notorious fact that nature is constantly making it, and that, too, of gasses in the earth, as all things else, save souls, are made. It has been fashionable to laugh at the idea of compounding a material capable of freeing the system of all its gross and clogging impurities—the only friction to the wheels of life; a mixture which would exhilarate, purify, strengthen, and supply to the body the chemical and dynamic forces of which it is constantly being robbed. But these wise people will have done laughing by-and-by; not by any means must it be thought that I, for a moment, entertained the silly notion of the alchemists and false Rosicrucians—of finding a material which when brought into contact with metals would change them into gold. We of this century are too knowing for that; nor that I hoped to discover, from the application of the old man’s