Fridrichstadt Leisure, or the Chemical Tantalus

There is no need for me to occupy myself at greater length about these things now: for there is no need for a hanging ivy for wine that is for sale. From the review of these journals, we know concerning what object learned men are occupied in the corners of the world, and a stimulus is added to men accomplished in learning, so that they may also direct their mind toward laudable efforts, illustrating the literary Republic.

In such a wealth and list of the labors of learned men, no science and art at all has so few of its own cultivators as true and solid Chemistry: In the list of six hundred authors in the theater, not a single Chemist is presented, so that it is a wonder that this art is valued upside down: when, however, this art, viewed in itself, is of such a very wide and diffuse tract that those who wish to reduce it into the form of an art would undertake a labor similar to if they wanted to count the grains of the sands of the shore. Chemistry is an art of such a kind that it cannot be included in circles of precepts and rules, and then it would experience the same fate that Physics has experienced. For after it was included by the fate of definitions, it obtained an unhappy success. It was in a much better state in the time of Aristotle, and it is also much better cultivated if the phenomena of nature are merely commemorated than if we bind the course of nature with precepts born in the brains of men. Some proceed in the same way with Chemistry. For just as it has been impossible for the entire learned world up to now, even if one were an Argus and Oedipus, to recount the mysteries of the generation of animals, insects, vegetables, and fungi, both univocally and equivocally, and the modes and variations of the mysteries by which nature commends itself: in a similar rite, Chemistry also diffuses itself. So that we cannot circumscribe its economy: it is equally impossible to reduce Chemistry into the form of an art, and to drag this as if bound in chains, and indeed unwilling. The number of those who follow what has been received so far and reduced into the form of an art is long, but the true knowledge of true Chemistry and higher cultivation is completely absent from men due to the scarcity of writers and cultivators, and because this requires more labor, industry, and expense than that which is reduced into the form of an art, which belongs to the students of the pharmaceutical art. For there are innumerable objects of this higher Chemistry and a manifold context of those objects, all of which completely reject the form of an art. Added to these are the most curious meditations of the most ingenious minds and