Literary Notices on the History of So-called Gold-making

In the earliest times, it was believed in the Orient that the transformation of base metals into nobler ones could be achieved. The Chinese possess a great alchemical work: The Guarded Dragon’s Gate of Pî schu original: Porta Draconis custodita του Pî schu. This name designates what we express through Basilius Valentinus A legendary 15th-century alchemist, likely a pseudonym, whose writings were highly influential in the development of chemistry., the collector of gold-cooking recipes original: Goldkocherey-Recepten. They imagine or "fable" that a dragon guards the place of true science, or of the philosopher’s stone|The legendary substance supposed to be capable of turning base metals into gold. This absurd collection is in the Paris National Library and consists of 163 booklets in twenty volumes, or covers. Fourmont, Chinese Grammar original: Gramm. Sin., page 479.

From India, the obsession with refining original: Veredlungssucht metals traveled to Egypt, and from there to the Greeks and Arabs.

Among the Greeks, Pelagius, [writing] on the divine and holy art, is probably the oldest. The whitening effect of arsenic was recorded by Stephan of Alexandria (around the year 615 AD); so that, strictly speaking, people have prattled about gold-making since the seventh century.

The learned physician Johann Stephan Bernard at Leiden published in 1745, as an appendix to Palladius’s Concise Synopsis on Fevers original: Palladii concisa Synopsi de Febribus, the [writings] of Jakob...