The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged

14 Golden Treatise

...or if someone wished to change another stone into gold, he would be utterly mistaken; since this is by no means permitted in the nature of sublunary things: And just as it was from the beginning, so it will be in the end, when the Almighty, who said FIAT in the beginning, will say, PEREAT. But among those things, whose material, seed, and composition of Elements are one and common, improvement and exaltation can easily be made and perfected according to the purity and perfection of their material. For example, we see a man endowed with a subtle and keen intellect raised to a higher degree of dignity than others who are not of such intellect, which derives its origin from the purity and subtlety of the spirits that are born from a rectified and well-constituted body. Thus we observe this horse far excelling another in its nobility, which is plainly visible in all species of living beings. Therefore, just as we see these things in animals, so much more may we observe them in herbs and trees. In trees, by transplantations, graftings, and other means known to gardeners; but in herbs, we are taught by daily experience how herbs and flowers of one species differ from another in their nobility, beauty, odor, and taste. Let carnations (which they call "tunic flowers") and tulips be an example to us, to say nothing of others. Good God, into how many species have these extended? Into innumerable ones, I say, which also become nobler and rarer day by day with diligent care, so much so that it is acknowledged that such fragrant and elegant flowers did not exist before. But what shall I say about metals, whose one common material is, namely, quicksilver digested and coagulated by the power of sulfur? Concerning this common material, Richard the Englishman thus begins:
The nature of things has naturally produced all kinds of fusible substances from mercury and the substance of its sulfur, because it is characteristic of quicksilver that it coagulates from vapor, just as from the heat of white or red non-burning sulfur.
And Arnold, part 1, ch. 2: Quicksilver is the Element of all fusible substances; for all fusible substances, when they melt, are converted into it, and it mixes with them, because it is of their substance: although these bodies differ in their composition from quicksilver, in the way that it itself was pure or impure from unclean sulfur foreign to it.
Rosinus