A wide rectangular woodcut headpiece featuring ornate foliate and acanthus leaf scrolls with a central human face mask.

Preface.

original: "Glück auf," the traditional German miners' greeting, wishing for the earth to open and reveal its treasures.

That all mere efforts of our own, without a thorough knowledge of Nature, are nothing but vain and futile things in this matter, can be sufficiently proven to us by the fixation fixation: the alchemical process of "fixing" a substance to make it stable and resistant to fire or maturation maturation: the historical belief that metals "ripen" like fruit within the earth over long periods of time of those volatile and subtle metal-bearing ores, which has been sought in so many places across Germany for a quite a long time; and while such a task is indeed possible and would be of indescribably magnificent benefit,