John Frederick Helvetius

In the autobiographical narrative of Bernard Trévisan it is possible to accept everything at its face value except the issue of his story, according to which—and at the close only of a long life of failure—he discovered the Great Secret by comparing alchemical texts, and in this manner was enabled to transmute metals. In view of the texts themselves there is nothing a priori more unlikely, while, as we have seen, in his concluding and pseudo-practical part he takes refuge in allegory, a device in which his work is stultified as a record of serious research. We are practically in no better position with Denys Zachaire, who owes everything at the end to the illumination of a single text. On the other hand, the striking evidence of an independent witness like Picus de Mirandula on things done in his presence produces no conviction because it does not appear that he had taken any precautions against deception. Outside the professed alchemists themselves a question therefore arises whether there is any case of transmutation performed or alleged to be performed by any known and responsible person who did not claim to be an adept on his own part; and the. answer is that John Frederick Helvetius is an example ready to our hands, with a record of extraordinary fullness which I will give in the first place, practically as it stands in the original Latin text. ¹ We shall see also that there is John Baptist Van Helmont, testifying in 1648, but his particulars are few in comparison with those of Helvetius.