Alchemy

A decorative woodcut headpiece featuring symmetrical foliage and scrollwork. Below the heading, an ornamental drop cap "E" contains an illustration of a landscape with a small figure.

GREETINGS TO THE READER.

FROM various authors, and from experience, the master of arts, under the guidance of the method assigned to the formation of the sciences, benevolent reader, I have compiled the precepts of ALCHEMY into a single work; many other things impelled me to this task, but most especially that I might benefit the studies of youth in this part of knowledge as well. How much effort has been expended in the other disciplines? The greatest masters have contended with every nerve so that they might stand forth as perfect as possible and aid the world with their utility; Chymistry alone has lain for the most part uncultivated. Aristotle records that in his time Dialectic was stuck in examples rather than precepts. If you assert the same regarding Chymistry, you do not err. There is no corner that does not teem with examples of operations: singular details are displayed everywhere, and some lurk in hidden places. Universal principles are silent, nor is there a rule to which singular details can be referred and by which they can be judged. And so it happens that, since many formulas for the same thing exist, it is not easy to judge to which head of the art they belong, by what name they should be called, nor how legitimately they have been described. Furthermore, if by chance a particular treatment of a singular matter does not exist, this evil results: that you are forced either to be ignorant of the preparation and thus omit it, or to look toward a doubtful model and fashion a shoe from the sight of a shoe, rather than from precepts, or to depend on the opinion of an equally uncertain master.

I believe a remedy for this evil has been found through a legitimate system of the art. There is also this advantage from it: that those things have been made manifest which previously lay hidden in the knowledge and power of a few. You will not be forced to inquire into and purchase arcana from impostors, nor to obtain a useless or shadowy and voluminous sheet of paper from the unskilled with a great sum of gold, nor to ask anxiously, nor to adjure all the gods and goddesses not to reveal it; all things will be open to you yourself. When likewise the Paracelsian impostor has boasted of great arcana, quintessences, tinctures, stones, extracts, etc., even though, besides dung-heaps and things cooked and recooked at home in badly constructed little furnaces...