Elixir

The reputation of Friar Roger Bacon (1214-1294) as a scientist was burnished lately when University of Pennsylvania chemists obtained salts of copper by one of his cryptic formulae (TiME, Dec. 13). But last week Friar

Roger was consigned again to the limbo of medieval credulity. Dean Robert Bell Burke of Pennsylvania, after four years' labor with the key discovered by a colleague, the late Dr. William Romaine Newbold, announced completion of the world's first translation of Friar Roger's 800-page Opus maius, prodigious cryptogram in monkish dog-Latin that men had thought might contain marvelous secrets.* Particularly was a skeptical world interested in knowing whether, by any rare chance, Friar Roger had actually possessed an "elixir of life." Alas, the Opus mains revealed he had not. He had only, in his scholarly way, described one. The formula was enough to discourage the most boldfaced charlatan that ever sold canal water for a cureall. Elixir of life contains: "That which is tempered in the fourth degree . . . gold "That which swims in the sea . . . pearl. "The thing that grows in the air . . . a flower. "That which is cast up by the sea . . . ambergris. "A plant of India . . . aloe. "That which is in the vitals of a long-lived animal . . . a bone growing in the stag's heart. "The two snakes which are the food of the Tyrians and Ethiopians."

* Begun by Friar Roger in 1266 at the command of Clement IV (Guy de Foulques) to survey and summarize knowledge in the 13th Century.