Chemical Letters to Excellent Philosophers and Physicians in Germany

D E D I C A T I O.

pillories are shown the ringleaders of the Parachymists, and the racks and tortures, or shameful flights and wicked desertions, are brought forth to the disgrace of the art. But ingenuous and wise men have always distinguished between those who wrongly snatch and usurp the titles and honors of the art for themselves, and its legitimate and modest Professors. They are mostly judged by their song and way of life. For those impostors cast out their tall talk and "cart-load words" Greek phrase: καὶ ἁμαξιαῖα ῥήματα words large enough to fill a cart, and as fugitives from the workshop, they have crept into the Vulcanian alchemical/metallurgical trade. Whoever was a perjured goldsmith, a lying astrologer, and maker of calendars, who was a shepherd—or rather a pestilent and fugitive mercenary—who was contaminated by the tools of the trade and similar people from this sewer, wherever they have seen a dream of a golden twig and have stolen a mystical schedule original: "schedulā mysticā" a secret recipe/formula from a philosopher, or obtained it from an impostor, or looked superficially with squinting eyes at the Germanisms of Paracelsus, and can now stammer something about filters and other things, they immediately carry themselves as chemists. They become "burners of charcoal" original: "Carboniperdæ" those who waste coal/fail to make gold behind their own furnaces, and whatever comes out of there by chance, they immediately show to the passing and ignorant as a chemical essence, and through the deaths of many, they make a journey to experi-