P R E F A C E

...soars over many difficult and sublime things: hence it seemed better to write what is true and useful, rather than what is false and grand. True things, however small they may be, provide the handle original: "ansam"; or opportunity for thinking out greater things. The infinite multitude of things is incomprehensible and extends toward infinity; it is greater than can be considered by men.

In writing, we shall set down the writings of our ancestors or of more recent authors; then, we shall bring forth what has been tested by us, whether they were true or false; afterwards, we present our own discoveries, so that the learned may see how remarkably the age of the moderns original: "recentiorum" has surpassed the ancients. For there are many who have written about things they never saw, and did not even know the simple ingredients simplicia: raw, unmixed medicinal or chemical substances, usually botanical entering into the work, but described them through the traditions of others with a certain innate and troublesome passion for adding untested details. Thus, errors are successively propagated and finally grow so immensely that not even the tracks of the originals appear; so that they can be read not only with difficulty as to the experiment, but not even without frequent laughter.

Furthermore, we omit many who, while transmitting wonders to be known by posterity and promising mountains of gold A proverbial expression for grand, impossible promises, used here to describe authors who exaggerate their results., write something different from what they themselves believed. Hence, those endowed with a loftier genius and more eager for learning are detained by a very long interval of time; because they distrust that they can attain those things, and realize they have wasted their effort and oil original: "operam & oleum"; a Latin idiom meaning to labor in vain, specifically referring to the oil burned in a lamp during late-night study, they are driven by desperation to a late regret. Others, then, having become wise at another's peril, learn to hate these things before they know them.

We have divided the secrets into their own classes, so that everyone may have what pleases them. Finally, I would have gladly passed over offending your ears if I did not have a care to refute the slanders of detractors and envious people who tear at me quite immodestly, thinking me to be a poisonous sorcerer Magum veneficum: a practitioner of "black" or harmful magic involving poisons, as opposed to "Natural Magic" which uses the laws of physics and nature—a name which I have shuddered at from my earliest childhood original: "a teneris unguiculis"; literally "from my tenderest nails," a common Latin idiom for infancy. and have considered a vain thing. Indeed, I