the full influence of the atmosphere. After this exposure, the grapes were put into the shade for five days, and, on the sixth, stamped or bruised in a vat; but as this process was found tedious and troublesome, the ripe grapes immediately from the vine itself were put into a cistern, in which was a hole, or vent near the bottom, with a vessel beneath to receive the liquor. In this cistern, a man with his bare feet and legs pressed out the juice,; but to relieve them from this labour, a piece of machinery was afterwards substituted. This was simply a beam, erected perpendicularly, having a cross acting as a lever, with a pressure of stones above, to give it greater weight or power, and which was worked by means of cordage. The practice, however, of treading out the juice with the feet, seems still to prevail in most eastern countries.* The Greeks did not keep their wine in casks as we do, for the use of vessels of that sort was unknown to them, as appears from Herodotus, who informs us, that wine was exported from different parts of Greece to Egypt, in earthen jars, which, when emptied, were afterwards sent into the Syrian deserts to preserve the water of the Nile.† The Athenians were famous for making these and other great vessels of earthenware, of which they claimed the invention; but, according to Aulus Gellius, the Samians were the first potters. This seems more probable, as, in the island of Samos, a fine species of red earth is found, from which, with the assistance of linseed oil, iron may be extracted; and from this clay the ancient vases, so much celebrated, are supposed to have been manufactured. These vases were tastefully formed, exceedingly light, and varnished with scented bitumen, receiving a polish like our finest crockery ware, and imparting an aromatic flavour to whatever they contained. Sometimes they were coated on the inside with pitch, mastic, and oil, incorporated with various odoriferous ingredients. Many of these vessels were of enormous size, particularly those used by the Romans, and they were commonly hooped to prevent them from bursting. One is said to have contained one hundred and twenty amphora, or 810 gallons of wine, and another is known to have held 210 gallons: but the Greeks preferred jars or vases of much smaller magnitude. The skins of beasts were also used for the same purpose, a custom which continues to this day, where wood is not plenty. The leathern bags, or borachios, thus used, were generally made out of the skins of goats, stripped off without being cut, the places from which the legs, &c. had been extracted, sewed up, and the top either tied or sealed. The Arabians of the present day Chandlers' Travels, p. 2. Herodotus, b. III. chap. i. § 6. follow this custom, and have a very ingenious method of taking off the skins. The head of the goat, or sheep, is first removed; and while the body is yet warm, the hand is introduced beneath the skin of the neck, and worked round until the two forefeet are drawn out. The skin is then stripped off so as to be without a cut or mark on it, and this forms the leathern bag just described. The bottles mentioned in Scripture were of this sort, the use of glass being then unknown. So we read, that when Abraham sent Hagar away, he put a bottle of water upon her shoulder, and hence our Saviour's instruction not to put new wine into old bottles, meaning that the fermentation of the wine would, more readily, burst an old than a new bottle of this description.*—It is generally believed, that the skins of animals were the most ancient receptacles of all liquids, but more especially of wine and they were rendered water-tight by a coating of resinous, oily matter: it was the skin of a goat in which Ulysses carried a supply of wine presented to him by the priest of Apollo, when he visited the cavern of the Cyclops. The largest of these wine-bags, of which there is any account, was that exhibited at a feast given by Ptolemy Philadelphus, and drawn on a car 75 feet long by 42 feet broad: this bag was composed of panthers' skins, and contained 20,250 gallons. The modern Greeks convey their wines to different parts in leathern or skin bags, such as those used by the Spaniards and Portuguese for the same purpose; and they are preferred to every other sort of vessel in consequence of being more portable. It is the practice, in many parts of the East, in making such wine-bottles, to turn the hairy side of the skin inwards. To the Gauls, who settled on the banks of the Po, we are indebted for the useful invention of preserving wine in casks or vessels of wood.† As chemistry may be said to have formed no part of the general knowledge of the ancient Greeks, it would be vain to look for any thing like distillation among them; for, although an ingenious and polished people, they do not appear to have been acquainted with that art. Medicine was much esteemed by them, but their pharmacopeia, until a late period, scarcely ever extended beyond the list of simples used by Hippocrates. Their early intercourse with the Egyptians made them familiar with the working of metals, but none of their writers anterior to Pliny, whose works have descended to us, shew that they were acquainted with the raising of steam or vapour to the same extent or in the manner described by that celebrated Roman.§ For a list of these simples, see Le Clerc's Hist. de la Med. part I. b. iii. cap. 23, § Vide page 11 of this work. Dioscorides, who was physician to Cleopatra, and contemporary with Pliny, was obliged to collect essential oil on the fleece of a sheep, a proof that he knew no other mode of distillation. One hundred and thirty one years subsequent to this, Galen, a celebrated physician of Pergamus, who wrote many books not only upon medical, but philosophical subjects, speaks of distillation per descensum, but it is conceived he meant nothing more by this than what regarded the melting of metals. Faber,* a writer in alchymy of some eminence, states that the art of distillation was known to Democritus, who was contemporary with Hippocrates, "primus enim inter Græcos distillandi peritus fuit Democritus distillationis autem peritiam didicit in Egypto," and that alchymy flourished in the time of Hermes Trismegistus, in Egypt, about A. M. 2434. He admits that neither Hippocrates nor Galen knew any thing of distillation; yet it appears extraordinary, that the most enlightened people on the earth should have remained ignorant of this art, 561 years after Democritus, unless it was kept a secret by him as well as by the Egyptians.-In the 12th chapter and 20th verse of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, there is a metephorical allusion to the same practice, which is thus beautifully expressed by Parnell : So artists melt the sullen ore of lead, In the kind warmth the metals learn to glow, In like manner, Caligula, according to Pliny, endeavoured to collect, by sublimation, gold from orpiment, a mineral substance found in different parts of the world.† Theophrastus and Dioscorides also describe the extraction of tar as effected by a similar process; and it is strange, that the same mode of obtaining it is still followed by the people of the northern provinces of Sweden. During the reign of Dioclesian, who succeded Marcus Aurelius Numerianus, in the year 284, we find the Egyptians had carried their speculations in chemistry so far as to induce that emperor to publish an edict for the suppression of all the ancient books that treated of the art of making gold and silver, and which he wantonly committed to the flames, being fearful, that if they became wealthy, they would be induced to resist the Roman yoke, and set him at defiance. But Faber wrote in 1627, and his works were printed at Strasburg in 1632. † Pliny, b. xxxiii. cap. 4. ‡ Vide Suidas in voce Xuría, Gibbon, vol. ii. p. 137. although this branch of speculative knowledge gave rise to many useful experiments, and was carried to a great height, we learn from the commentary on the second book of Aristotle's Meteors, written by Olympiodorus, a peripatetic philosopher, who flourished under the second Theodosius, that distillation was not then known, at least in a more improved state, than it was 400 years before; for he says, that "Sailors, when they labour under a scarcity of fresh water at sea, boil the sea-water, and suspend large sponges from the mouth of a brazen vessel, to imbibe what is evaporated, and in drawing this off from the sponges, they find it to be sweet water." It is said that Zosimus, the Panopolite, who lived at the close of the 4th or beginning of the 5th century, has given some figures of a distilling apparatus, which Olaus Borrichius, the learned Danish professor, has exhibited in his Hermetis et Ægyptiorum Chemicorum Sapientia, p. 156. This Zosimus was the first who used the word chemia, which, in the Arabic language, signifies concealment, and from which Boerhaave and others derive the term chemistry, implying the hidden or occult science. Zosimus was a man of considerable attainments, he wrote twenty-four books of Imouth, or chemistry, addressed to his sister Theosebia. Most if not all, of these treatises are preserved in the king's library at Paris, but have not yet been translated. From the specimen and account, however, which Borrichius gives of them they seem to be mystical and enthusiastic.* Zosimus is of opinion, that both the name and science of chemistry existed before the flood: and there is certainly reason to believe, that as the arts had been cultivated by the antediluvians, that the ancient Chaldeans and Egyptians preserved traces of them, which were not obliterated when the philosophers and historians of Greece visited Africa and Asia; they are even discernible amidst the confusion of names, dates, and lapse of time, in spite of the clouds of fables with which they are enveloped. Hence it is not unlikely, that Vulcan and Tubal-Cain are the same person, since both were skilled in such works as required the operations of fire; and that Vul-can is but a corruption or contraction of Tubal-Cain, appears highly probable. In tracing the etymology of the word chemistry, it seems to be derived from the name of the country in which it first had existence. Egypt is frequently denominated by the Hebrew writers the land of Cham; and Chami, or Chemi, was the name by which it was most generally known to the aborigines. Plutarch says, that Egypt was called Chemia, from the blackness of the soil. Cham in Hebrew signifies hot, Cham also signifies black; and Chemia,† but with an ain for the final Boerhaave's Elementa Chemiæ. Valpy's Classical Journal, vol. xviii. p. 229, &c. radical, signifies, in Chaldaic, fermentation. From this reasoning, it is no stretch of inference to assume, as before hinted at, that the doctrine of fermentation was known even before the deluge, and there is therefore nothing extraordinary in Noah's having made wine, and subjecting himself to its influence. Sometime previous to the period in which Zosimus lived, and for a series of years afterwards, chemistry was cultivated with great earnestness by several Grecian ecclesiastics, but their efforts and attentions were principally directed to the art of making gold and silver. In the meantime, medicine received considerable improvements from the labours of Oribasius, Actius, Alexander, Paulus, and others. Distillation, it is related, was discovered in the Augustine age by a Grecian physician, who, while sitting at dinner, was suddenly called away to visit a patient, and found, on his return, that the cover which had been placed over a dish of vegetables was dripping with moisture evaporated from them. Perceiving that the moisture was an extract from the materials in the dish occasioned by heat, he is said to have directed his studies to the consequences that might result from experiments made on this principle, and ultimately arrived at the art of distillation; but this story rests on such slender testimony, that it is not entitled to more than this incidental notice. Some will have it, that the invention of distillation is much older, and ground their opinions on the circumstance of a chest having been found in the Alestine field, near Padua, in which, it is said, an urn was enclosed by Maximus Olybius, devoted as an offering or present to Pluto, containing two phials, most curiously wrought, the one of gold and the other of silver, both full of an exquisite liquor, which fed a burning lamp for many ages. Upon the chest was inscribed : This sacred gift to Pluto I forbid On the urn were the following couplets : Begone, ye thieves, why dare you here to pry, Devoted to great Pluto, in this pitcher Lies a grand gift, the world scarce knows a richer." This legend, like the other respecting the origin of distillation, rests on authority equally trifling, and is one of those fanciful conceptions Taylor's Antiquitates Curiosa. |