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14 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
into
the future. Hence Ponce de Leon's quest for the "Fountain of Youth" in
our Florida. But in addition to this, there has ever been an intense
desire to find something by means of which gold could be made out of
the baser metals, for youth and vigor, if coupled with poverty, are
only half-blessings. The search for the "Philosopher's Stone" appears
to have been a more or less aimless pursuit of this end ; but there can
be no doubt that this search led to the discovery of many new
substances and reactions, and helped to lay the foundation of our
modern chemistry. Whether the conscious aim of the alchemist was the
discovery of an actual stone, or merely the discovery of some process
for turning a valueless substance into one of great value, is not
clearly ascertainable from the purposely vague and obscure treatises on
alchemy.
The
"Philosopher's Stone," the fond dream of so many who delved into
nature's mysteries in the past, does not seem so improbable to-day as
it did twenty years ago. The recent discovery of the element radium,
which is produced from the element uranium, and the story of the
strange and protean changes of radium into helium, neon and argon,
according to the environment in which it is placed, have given the
death-blow to the old idea of the immutability of the elements. Still,
while we have been allowed this peep into the storehouse of nature's
secrets, and are growing to believe that in eons of time the various
different elements may have been evolved, successively, from one
another, the power to provoke this change at will and in a brief space
of time is as yet withheld from us, and may never be given to us, just
as little as the power to send messages to the distant spheres, whose
bulk, density and composition we can estimate with a-considerable
degree of accuracy.
Numerous specimens still exist of what is alleged to be artificial gold made by the alchemists of a past age. Of
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