Simonides Redivivus, or the Art of Memory and Oblivion

although I have never feared the smoke and blackness of coals, nor even now do I fear them, so as to be deterred from applying myself to chemical operations; yet I would have considered it most highly to be wished for, and to be held as a place of the greatest benefit and assistance, a laboratory of such a kind in which neither coal nor the smoke of coals is perceived. Not long ago, a certain man of such a kind, excelling in virtue, talent, and Hermetic glory, arriving from foreign places, was preaching to me about this. I would have most willingly known the artifice, but I could not obtain it from him, since it was a secret held by him as if he were its inventor. Nevertheless, the excellent man provided an opportunity, by this reason, to think and speculate diligently about a matter that is far more useful. And I seem to myself to have touched the thing with the needle meaning to have hit the mark or understood the crux of the matter, although I have not yet completed with work and hand what I conceived in my mind. A single, larger furnace, lurking somewhere outside the laboratory, is sufficient for many small furnaces, for baths, steam rooms, ashes, sands, iron filings, etc., and finally for various degrees of fire, of which you can be a participant without any delay, and almost in a moment, outside of any labor, and without a new ignition of fire; just as easily, promptly, and definitively as when water bursts forth from a barrel or canal in a small or large quantity, according to whether the spigot is moved little or much in its place. Nor is there ever a need for the removal of ashes, of which none are present here; no washing of hands; no wiping of glass instruments and others from dusty and coal-derived filth. Everything here is clean and tidy. A thing truly most desired by all who approach the anatomies of things by fire.