ABSTRACT
Eirenæus Philalethes, who described himself as natu Anglus, habitatione Cosmopolita, is the chief adept in evidence, by the fact of very numerous writings and vital force of claim, during the second half of the seventeenth century, or from 1667 onward, when his first and most notable tract was edited by Langius and issued at Amsterdam. I have no intention of retracing a ground which has been travelled on several previous occasions in my various monographs and studies of his predecessor, Eugenius Philalethes, with whom he was confused so long and frequently. I will take up therefore the question of his identity at the point where it was left in the year 1919 when I edited for the first time the complete Works of Thomas Vaughan. In a prefatory excursus to that collection it was determined, to the best of my knowledge and belief, that he neither was nor could have been that twin brother of Henry the Silurist who wrote memorable Hermetic tracts between 1650 and 1655 under the sacramental name of Eugenius Philalethes. The position thus formulated has not been challenged and remains, as it seems to me, beyond dispute. I could have almost wished otherwise, or perhaps that I had been able to exhibit a satisfactory reason why there is no record of Thomas Vaughan being buried by Thames at Albury, as his story states, namely, that he did not die in 1665, but went over the world wandering—to the Americas and otherwhere—and wrote yet further treatises, manuscript copies of which he left there and here, but himself printed nothing. I mean that to have done this, if possible, would have been more interesting to the sense of romance than shewing how Vaughan perished through a chemical explosion at the house of a dissolute parson and how impossible it is to recognise the hand of Eugenius in the writings of Eirenæus Philalethes.
