By Conrad Gessner, certainly a learned man, and perhaps a physician of Bern. Gessner was a famous 16th-century Swiss naturalist and polymath.

CHRYSOGONUS

POLYDORUS’S PREFACE

to several small books regarding alchemy original Greek: περὶ χυμείας (peri chymeias) addressed to the Reader.

Decorative woodcut initial 'C' featuring a figure, possibly a scholar or saint, within a circular frame surrounded by foliage.

WHEN I wished to release from our library several selected treatises of the ancients regarding alchemy to the printers to be published, so that a greater benefit might flow from them to those eager for Philosophy, I judged that I ought to provide some small preface. For I do not doubt that many men—good men indeed,
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but nevertheless unskilled in the nature of things—may believe that this entire branch of art should be utterly despised and covered in silence: either because they suppose it to be entirely false, or because they think it too difficult to be investigated with such great labors for an uncertain outcome. I myself, truly, although I was once of that same opinion, was enticed by a desire for learning and diligently examined this class of authors as the opportunity arose; and I found so much knowledge of things...