Introduction to the Divine Art of Chemistry

This art, however, is followed by the art which, through hammer blows and concussions, extends heated iron into different rods, in magnitude and smallness. And this is followed by many arts, taking from this substantive as much and as much as is sufficient for itself. Whence someone says:

The art makes anchors from them for ships, some plowshares, some sickles, some tongs, some swords and blades, some bits for horses, some helmets, some nails, and some it extends into very long thin wires, from which some makes needles for sewing, some hooks for fishing, some mail coats, and thus many arts follow the same substantive, according to the genus. And some vary, according to the diverse acceptance of it in them, namely by considering the various and diverse accidents in the same subject. And these arts are about diverse accidents considered in the same things. Similarly, we say in other metals, and in wood, and in stone, and in wool, and in flax, because there are infinite accidents through which arts are considered in things. Similarly, in beings of reason, such a diversity of accidents is found entirely, as is clear in Grammars, Dialectics, and Rhetorics, which are about such a being. Similarly, the subject of the science of medicine and its parts are subalternated to natural philosophy, and it is a true science, because it rises from true principles and is subalternated to natural philosophy, which is a true science. And just as to the science of the soul follows the science of vegetables, and of sense and the sensed, and of sleep and waking, and of animals, and of health and sickness, and of the intellect and the intelligible, and of death and life, and of youth and old age, because of the diversity of the soul, and the diversity of its parts, and the diversity of its passions: So to the science of minerals follows the science of Alchemy, because of the diversity of metals, and the transmutation of them into one another in their mines, and the transmutation of their principles, made different from nature, in the generations of diverse things, in which the art, wonderfully administered, has attempted to follow nature, in the transmutations of metals, and