Note 658 — Chapter XLV

Berthelot is a poor guide in any such matter since his pretentious volumes on medieval alchemy are based on the study of a comparatively small number of MSS at Paris. He made little or no use of the Sloane collection in the British Museum which is very rich in alchemical MSS, a subject in which Sir Hans Sloane was apparently much interested, or of the Ashmolean collection at Oxford, although Elias Ashmole edited the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652, “containing several poetical pieces of our famous English philosophers who have written the hermetic mysteries in their own ancient language,”—a work in which Ashmole himself is called Mercuriophilus Anglicus.