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“Signa tene cædis: pullosque et luctibus aptos

Semper habe feætus, gemina monumenta cruoris.”

Ovid. Metamorph. Lib. iv. 160.

Sir William Drummond, the learned apologist of Egyptian science, conceives that the laws of latent heat were even known to the philosophers of that ancient nation, and that caloric in such a state, was symbolically represented by Vulcan, while free or sensible caloric was as clearly described in the character of Vesta. Those who maintain the antiquity of chemistry, and suppose that the fabulous conceptions of the ancients were but a mysterious veil ingeniously thrown by philosophy between nature and the lower order of people, consider that the alchemical secret is metaphorically concealed in the fable of the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts, and reject the more probable solution of this story by Strabo, who says that the Iberians, near neighbours of the Colchians, used to receive the gold, brought down from the high lands by the torrents, into sieves and sheep skins, and that from thence arose the fable of the golden fleece. Dionysius, of Mytilene, offers a different explanation of the fable, and supposes it to allude to a book written on skins, and containing an account of the process of making gold according to the art of alchemy.