Epistolary Form of Chemical Matters

men of highest talent and praised reputation, who have spent a great deal of effort in learning, expanding, adorning, and illustrating it. But even among the nobility there have been found those who have set a high value on it, and who have promoted it to greater excellence at their own expense and with their own generosity. Hieronymus Rubeus, a Philosopher and Physician of Ravenna, collected many arguments for not only the antiquity but also the dignity of chemistry, among which is the fact that, as Albucasis reports, the Abarach Kings were very much delighted by the art of distillation, and that Robert, King of Naples, and Odoardus, King of England, along with others, held its professors in the highest regard. The same author recounts many Princes of Italy who were occupied in this study with great pleasure. It is a sacrilege to assign to such heroes anything that smacks of the filth of the common people. Therefore, this art has preserved its own splendor in the council of truth and the theater of the highest dignity. No one is ignorant of how much effort has been spent in our own times in Germany on cultivating it, unless he be someone ignorant of the chronicles and annals of history. I pass over Craton, Zwinger, Gesner, and others who...