Medical-Chemical Work

A decorative drop cap 'M' with ornate floral and foliate motifs within a square frame.

There are truly many causes that have impelled me to write this Medico-Chemical work, or Medical Basilicas, Friendly Reader, but especially the fact that Chemistry alone is in large part uncultivated. Aristotle reports that in his time Dialectics remained in examples rather than in precepts: if you say the same about Chemistry, you do not err in any way. Every corner teems with examples of operations, singular things stand out everywhere, and they partly lie hidden in secret places: the universal things are silent, nor is there a standard to which these singularities can be recalled and judged. But what? I believe help and medicine for this basilisk, or evil, have been found through a legitimate system of the art, or a Basilica. This is also a Compendium, so that those things may be made manifest which previously lay hidden in the knowledge and power of a few. You are no longer forced to inquire and redeem secrets from impostors, nor with great effort to obtain useless gold or shadowy and voluminous documents from the ignorant, nor to solicitously ask, nor to adjure all gods and goddesses not to manifest things; all things will be clear to you yourself. We are not unaware that even the most excellent and proven authors, for the sake of hiding their inventions and restraining wickedness, called their secrets by various and monstrous names: But I would have you persuade yourself of this, that their mind was always concordant and constant, which not deceptive speech, but the concurrence of things and experience has opened. It is not for you to make these like the impostors; for many of the wise, and most all of them unanimously, revealed their things in hidden words, opened only to the children of wisdom; as is evident from our Philosophical Basilica. But I judge that there is no need here for verbose patronage: at least you must be warned by me in this new, and almost beyond-belief-audacious attempt.

Many will deny, and will deny, that I could give the entire art, because it cannot happen that those occult decrees about the Philosophers' Stone and other secrets have become known to me, since it is established that no one can reach those Mysteries unless God teaches through oracles, or Masters show them in person. It is not that we should think the power of God in our age is more contracted and stingier than in the old one, since he has blessed the dregs of the world with greater benefits than the flower: but however I am judged not affected, the Method has allowed me not to be ignorant of the place and head of the art, which is owed to that treatment. To me indeed (for let it be permitted for a little while to be a fool with you) the speech and process of the Philosophers appears sufficiently evident: if you do not understand it, impute that to yourself, not to me or to the Philosopher, and to your own ignorance, but for that reason do not despair of the art, nor...