On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art | Page 5

that the Egyptian priests
looked on the Greeks as children who failed to understand the great
mysteries involved in their religious rites, disguised as they were in
symbolic form. But, besides their indebtedness to Egypt, we will find
that they also owed much to Persia, and through it again to Indian
sources of knowledge.
There was constant communication between the Grecian and Persian
nations. We learn that it was not uncommon for Grecian generals to
take service under the Persian Satraps, tempted by the liberal
recompence with which their services were rewarded. About the year
356 B.C. this system of Greeks accepting service under Persian Satraps
nearly caused the outbreak of war between Greece and Persia--Chares,
a Grecian commander, having assisted with his fleet and men,
Artabanus, the Satrap of Propontis, who was then in revolt against the
Persian king. But before this, during the great plague which desolated
Athens in 430 B.C., and which also extended to Persia, Hippocrates
was invited to go to the Persian Court; and it is on record that Ctesias

was for seventeen years physician at the Persian Court about 400 B.C.,
during which period he wrote his history of Persia, and an account of
India, which Professor Wilson, in a paper read to the Ashmolean
Society of Oxford, has shown to contain notices of the natural
productions of the country, "which, although often extravagant and
absurd, are, nevertheless, founded on truth."
There were, too, Grecian soldiers employed as paid auxiliaries, and a
colony of Greeks who had been taken prisoners of war was founded
within a day's journey of Susa.
The great expedition to Persia, and the graphic description of the retreat
of the "ten thousand" Greeks, given by Xenophon in his Anabasis, must
have been well known to Alexander the Great when he set out on his
career of conquest. He overthrew the Persian empire in 331 B.C.,
having destroyed Tyre and subdued Egypt in the previous year and
carried his triumphant progress to the banks of the Indus, and there he
"held intercourse with the learned sages of India." On Alexander's
death Seleucus succeeded to the throne of Persia in 307 B.C., and not
long after he forced his way beyond the Indus, and ultimately as far as
the sacred river Ganges. He formed an alliance with the Indian king
Sandrocottus (otherwise known as Chandra-gupta), which was
maintained for many years, and it is said, also, that he gave his
daughter in marriage to the Indian king, and aided him with Grecian
auxiliaries in his wars.
He sent an expedition by sea, under the command of Patrocles his
admiral, who visited the western shores of India, and a little later he
despatched an embassy under Megasthenes and Onesicrates, the former
of whom resided for some years at the "great city" of Palibothra
(supposed to be Patna).
Not long after Megasthenes was at Palibothra, Ptolemy Philadelphus
sent an expedition overland through Persia to India, and later Ptolemy
Euergetes, who lived between 145-116 B.C., sent a fleet under
Eudoxius on a voyage of discovery to the western shores of India,
piloted, as is said, by an Indian sailor who had been shipwrecked, and
who had been found in a boat on the Red Sea. Eudoxius reached India

safely, and returned to Egypt with a cargo of spices and precious
stones.
The proof of very ancient communication between Greece and India is
quite clear, both by way of Persia and Egypt, and we find that the
Greeks, who were in the habit of calling all other nations barbarians,
speak constantly with respect of the gymnosophists--called "Sapientes
Indi" by Pliny. We read also of the Greek philosophers constantly
travelling eastward in search of knowledge, and on their return setting
up new schools of thought. Thales, it is affirmed, travelled in Egypt and
Asia during the sixth century B.C., and it is said of him that he returned
to Miletus, and transported that vast stock of learning which he had
acquired into his own country.
He is generally considered as the first of the Greek philosophers. Strabo
says of him that he was the first of the Grecian philosophers who made
inquiry into natural causes and the mathematics.
The doctrine of Thales, that water was the first elementary principle, is
exactly that of the ancient Hindoos, who held that water was the first
element, and the first work of the creative power. This idea was not
completely exploded even up till the 18th century. We find Van
Helmont affirming that all metals, and even rocks, may be resolved into
water; and Lavoisier, so lately as 1770, thought it worth while to
communicate an elaborate paper "On the nature of water and the
experiments by which it has been attempted to prove the possibility of
converting it into earth."
Pythagoras,