Three Books on Gold

it pleased that gold should be called, to everything else. But why he believed that to have been the cause of the nomenclature, when he could easily have known that it did not displease good authors—that the word had been transferred from the language of the Sabines, who said ausum, with one letter changed—however that may be, silver delighted the eyes of Pliny more than gold, in which matter, if he felt what he wrote, he cannot be faulted, but he has plainly suffered censure when he revealed that gold is surpassed in weight by lead; for the experiments of posterity protest. While he thought that a minimum of gold is lost by use, he could have remembered that by the rubbing of fingers, both a gold coin and a ring are consumed, and that which is the least is not nothing. There were also those who thought that gold suffers no detriment from fire, relying on the authority of Aristotle in the third book of the Meteorology, which authority indeed is either not solid or not rightly understood; for it is convinced by experiments: it has its own weight of gold diminished by fire that is vehement and especially long-lasting, which has also been revealed in writings and has been proven in our age, that gold vanishes when placed in fire with certain mixed dust, in which not only city dwellers, but country folk and their little women can abound. It is likewise discovered by a small matter, especially in the use of men, that the tawny color is drawn from gold, and can never be restored once it is withdrawn, the golden color remaining with that dust by whose application the reddish radiance departed from it;