He went so far as to say that one of these spirits
in the Saxon mine of Annaberg destroyed twelve workmen at once
by the power of his breath.
At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on
mineralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had
been in large part abandoned on account of the "evil spirits of
metals which had taken possession of them."
Even as late as the seventeenth century, Van Helmont, after he
had broken away from alchemy and opened one of the great paths
to chemistry--even after he had announced to the world the
existence of various gases and the mode of their generation--was
not strong enough to free himself from theologic bias; he still
inclined to believe that the gases he had discovered, were in
some sense living spirits, beneficent or diabolical.
But at various. periods glimpses of the truth had been gained.
The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far
back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the
Great suggested a natural cause in the possibility of
exhalations from minerals causing a "corruption of the air";
but he, as we have seen, was driven or dragged off into,
theological studies, and the world relapsed into the
theological view.
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