Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541) was a physician, alchemist and reformer whose work on minerals, mining diseases and chemical remedies had a genuine and lasting effect on medicine, and whose cosmology is inseparable from it. The elemental beings belong to that cosmology and are presented in the treatise as a matter of natural philosophy, part of a full account of what God made, rather than as folklore.
The scheme was taken up in the Rosicrucian literature of the seventeenth century, satirised at length in the Abbe de Villars's Comte de Gabalis (1670), from which most later occult writers actually got it, and absorbed into the ritual system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century, where the four orders were assigned to the quarters and used in elemental workings. The route from a Swiss physician's treatise to a Victorian magical order is direct and traceable.
Sources Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the RenaissanceWalter Pagel with Dictionary of Gnosis and Western EsotericismWouter J. Hanegraaff (editor), The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie