COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

590 COSMOS.
advances of chemistry, are so much the more important as
they imparted a knowledge of the heterogeneous character of
matter, and the nature of forces not made manifest by motion,
but which now led to the recognition of the importance of com-
of form assumed
position, no less than to that of the perfectibility
in accordance with the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato.
Differences of form and of composition are, however, the
elements of all our knowledge of matter, the abstractions
which we believe capable, by means of measurement and
analysis, of enabling us to comprehend the whole universe.
It is difficult, at present, to decide what the Arabian
chemists may have acquired through their acquaintance with
Indian literature (the writings on the Rasayana] ;* from the
ancient technical arts of the Egyptians the ; new alchernistic
precepts of the pseudo-Democritus and the sophist Synesius ;
or even from Chinese sources, through the agency of the
Moguls. According to the recent and very careful investigations
of a celebrated Oriental scholar, M. Remand, the inven-
tion of gunpowder,f and its application to the discharge of
hollow projectiles, must not be ascribed to the Arabs.
Hassan Al-Rammah, who wrote between 1285 and 1295, was
not acquainted with this application; whilst even in the
twelfth century, and therefore nearly two hundred years
*
The chemistry of the Indians, embracing alcliemistic arts, is called
rasdyana (rasa, juice or fluid, also quicksilver; and ayana, course or
process), and forms, according to Wilson, the seventh division of the
dyur- Veda, the "science of life, or of the prolongation of life." (Royle,
Hindoo Medicine, pp. 39-48.) The Indians have been acquainted from
the earliest times (Royle, p. 133) with the application of mordants in
calico or cotton printing, an Egyptian art, which is most clearly described
in Pliny, lib. xxxv. cap. 11, No. 150. The word "chemistry" indicates
for Plutarch (de Iside
literally " Egyptian art," the art of the black land ;
et Osir. cap. 33) knew that the Egyptians called their country Xj//n'a,
from the black earth. The inscription on the Eosetta stone has Chmi.
I find this word, as applied to the analytic art, first in the decrees of
"
Diocletian against the old writings of the Egyptians which treat of
the '
^rffjiia' of gold and silver," (Trepi %?7jUi'a dpyupou /cat %puao{5).
Compare my Examen crit. de Vhist. de la Geographic et de I'Astronomie
nautigue, t. ii. p. 314.
f Reinaud et Fave, du Feu gregeois, des Feux de guerre
et des
origines de lapoudre a canon, t. i. 1845, pp. 89, 97, 201 and 211;
Piobert, Traite d'Artillerie, 1836, p. 25; Beckmann, Technologic,
s. 342.