Simonides Redivivus, or the Art of Memory and Oblivion

or letters, and without (I swear) the ministries of malignant Spirits. Concerning the truth of which latter, however, just as I have no doubt: so I shall assert nothing for the present; since opportunities have thus far been lacking for me to prove and examine it. So that on this account it is most rightly written by the Comic poet: No one has ever lived with their life so well reasoned, but that circumstances, age, and experience have always brought something new.

Quercetanus in Tetr., page 120, and on the signature of internal things, page 114.

Pareus in the treatise on Renunciations, etc.

I have often thought about the furnace and the fire, by which the Spirit of wine can be distilled in the museum and at the table, oils rectified, and extracts, salts, and other things of this kind that require moderate heat and a diligent eye, prepared. For it is most tedious, if these things are carried out in a laboratory, in the usual place and with the usual fire and bath, to depart so often from books and other affairs to be done, and to apply the mind and eyes to chemical art. If you are absent from it for longer than is right, it can easily happen that the phlegm mixes with the Spirit of wine, the extracts thicken more than is just, and they lose their more powerful properties. But to want to perform these things and be careful in a hypocaust a heating chamber and in bedrooms, by the common way of distillation, through a water bath, ashes, or sand, is in no way advisable for good health: for when embers are used, which besides the fact that they strongly threaten health, and, especially in a narrow room lacking a chimney, are harmful, as most excellent men and physicians, and many tragic cases testify: they also not rarely stir up smoke which is very troublesome to the eyes, and stains books and other contents of the room. What is more, can they even be handled in such a way that the hands are not blackened? What seems to affect a scholar as much as a charcoal-burner does a fuller, about whom there is a fable? But if you use a bath, the exhalations will be doubled due to the water resolved by the heat, in whose place new water must not rarely be poured. This which