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248
HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.
of governments to the confusions which these impostures
were producing, and predicted from them a renewal of the
scenes which had attended the fanaticism of the Ana-
baptists."
Andreas Libavius was born at Halle in Saxony about the
year 1560. He was appointed professor of history and
poetry at Jena in 1588, practised as a physician at Eotem-
bourg on the Tauber from 1591 till 1605, when he became
rector of the college of Casimir at Coburg in Franconia,
where he died in 1616. He was the first writer who
mentioned the transfusion of blood from one animal to
another, and the property of oxide of gold to colour glass
red. He also invented a chemical preparation, called the
liquor of Libavius, "a highly concentrated muriatic acid,
much impregnated with tin," and which has been long used
in laboratories. He has been falsely represented by M.
Hoefer as a follower of Paracelsus, but appears to have
believed in the transmutation of metals, and in the medical
virtues of various auriferous preparations.
He is considered
to rank among the first students of chemistry who pursued
experimental researches upon
"Alchymia Eecognita" and his "History
the true method. His
of Metals "are
among the best practical manuals of the period. Though
seeking the Philosophick Stone, he attached no credit to
the Eosicrucian manifestoes, and was one of the first writers
who attacked them, in two Latin folios dated 1615, and
in a smaller German pamphlet which appeared in the fol-
lowing year.
The first of these works contains an exhaus-
tive criticism of the Harmonico-Magical Philosophy of the
mysterious Brotherhood. It is entitled "Exercitatio
Paracelsica nova de notandis ex scripto Fraternitatis de
1 De Quincey, " Rosicrucians and Freemasons," c. ii.