[4] He led an itinerant life in wanderings in Europe, an adjective already applied to him by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in his 1711 Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

[6] Franciscus van Helmont had important groups of contacts in the Netherlands, where he knew Adam Boreel and Serrarius,[7] and later in life, in 'the Lantern', the circle around the Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly that included John Locke.

From 1644, when his father died, to 1658, when Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor ennobled him, he was constantly involved in diplomacy for German princes and their families.

[11] In 1661 he was in Kitzingen when he was forcibly taken by soldiers of Philipp Wilhelm, Elector Palatine to Rome and a prison of the Inquisition, where he was tortured and kept for 18 months.

[12] His first published work was a 1667 Latin treatise Alphabeti veri naturalis hebraici brevissima delineatio (usual short English title Alphabet of Nature) on Adamic language, which he equated with Hebrew.

[13] He argued that the Hebrew alphabet implicitly gave a pronunciation guide, analogous to a musical notation for the tongue and voice.

[21] Twenty years later, he was a figure in the Keithian Controversy, a schism formed in the Quakers, in which van Helmont took the side of George Keith who broke away.