San Antonio daily light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1886-1907, 1891-07-24
MODERN ALCHEMISTS.
Some of the Remarkable Things
that Recent Discoveries Make
Possible.

Possible.
From the London Spectator.
1t Is difficult to watch the singular
inquiry now going on before Mr.. Han
nay-the case known to reporters as
"The Philosophers Stone" in which
Mr.. Streeter prosecutes man who as
sured him that he could multiply gold
by three-without asking oneself the
question why such cases are nova
days so infrequent, One would have
fancied, a priori, that they would be
common. They were frequent to.
wards the close of the last century,
"adepts" who offered to make gold
or to sell the elixir of life appearing in
most capitals of Europe; and the
ground for their operations in our
time has been much more carefully
MANFRED. Right through the minds
of the half educated but well-to-dO,
who form deep stratum lying above
the fluid "massesn of our modern
society there is a credulity about
science, and the possible acquisitions
of man through science, which is at
least as wonderful as the readiness
to believe in baseless or impossible
theological propositions. No state
ment is too wild to be accepted if
only it is made in the name of
science. and is supported by some
plausible sentences or some name of
authority, and this, too, even if it in
wolves an priori impOssibility. The
reasoning powers of men have not
been developed like their knowledge
of facts-we know at least one man
of learning who asserts that there
may be a world in which two plus
two make five, thing impossible 10
the Deity-and science has attracted
and fired mems imaginations until
they have in many cases ceased al
most to be able to think about the
antecedent probability of any asser.
ton said to be scientific. We have
not the remOtest doubt that If the
Times announces to morrow that
method of securing perpetual motion
had been discovered, or that the
circle had been squared, or that a
new sensitized paper had revealed
the features of men in Mars, or that
Mr.. Edison had invented a perpetual
self-renewing light, the statement
would be believed for week at
least by men not generally suspected
either OF ignorance or OF deficiency in
shrewdness. The telegraph, it would
be said, would have seemed impos.
sible to our ancestors; and as the
phOnograph exists, and can repeat
sen tences uttered years ago in
their dead speakers voice, why
should not anything else be dis
covered in its turn? Despite the pre-
valence of skepticism as to spiritual
things, a materialistic credulity Is
rampant, and We should have
thought that the old dream about
manufactured gold, and the tincture
which kept off death, and the SELL
sustaining light, would have APP
pealed to it most powerfully. People
have been accus toned for years to
the great triumphs of hygiene, and to
the use OF Lreyentlves which, like
QuimuUe, do seem 70 liberate some
constitutions from liability to ma
larious poison, and the notion of an
antlseptic drug which can arrest de-
cay from all causes will not strike
all of them as absurd. We do
arrest decay in dead things, as for
example. when we freeze meat, or
en- balm bodies by the Curln method,
or inject preservative fluids into rail
way sleepers: and why not living tbs
sues also? If the organism could be
preserved unchanged, why should not
life remain in it, at least for wholly
precedented periods? There is no
proof of the necessity of death except
universal and unbroken experience,
and one morsel of evidence against
it-namely, the absence, in the case
of all conscious creatures, of a
fixed terminal period of life.
Many animals live double the usual
lives of their own kind. Some one
man must have lived longer than
anybody else; and if so, to say he
could have lived twice as long, or
have avoided death altogether til
the conditions of life on the planet
altered, is not a con tradictlOn in terms
Considering that some men have
health throughout long lives; that
there are healthy places, where some
inveE|AT5cover as if by magic; and
that certain conditions of hygiene
really have heightened life, we rather
wonder that somebody does not in
vent and find believers in true elixir
of the old kind. 1t would be only, so
to speak, quinine exalted to the nth
power The desire for life
is passion with many-though we
have a suspicion that it decays slight
ly as the. centuries roll on, and
that we may reach what Mr.. Louis
Stevenson describes as the attitude
of mind among the natives of the
Marquesas, who prefer, when they
can afford it, to sleep habitually in
their coffins-and with that, and the
scientific credulity generated by such
considerations as we have quoted, the
elixir ought to be marketabl 1t is