Manuscript Transmitted to the Serene Duke of Holstein Explaining the Obscure Matters of Alchemists

with which he will unlock and reveal hidden things, if any exist. Let the Most Serene Prince read and reread this treatise, for the use of reading it will make the remaining books of the ancient chemists, as many as there are, clear and open, and will erase their obscurity. For it lights a supreme flame in the darkness, and puts it to flight: it most clearly interprets and explains the most obscure writings and axioms of the chemists for the benefit of the Most Serene Prince. Accept, therefore, Most Serene Prince, this gift with the benevolence and friendship with which you have bound and obligated yourself to me: for it will arrive at the desired result, provided that patience and great leisure are employed. For our work requires patience and great leisure: haste must be eliminated from afar as if it were diabolical. For the metallic seed must be cooked with long and perennial labor, and continuously, so that it may arrive at maturity and cast off its useless and superfluous dross. For we need nothing but the purest metallic seed; we reject the rest as useless and superfluous, and we carry out our work from our purest mercurial metallic substance, as all authors of chemistry testify, and nature herself provides faith. For from that purest substance, not the common one, gold and silver are produced. Thus art, by imitating nature, accepts this sole purest substance, and from it alone performs and completes its work, as is seen most clearly throughout this whole following Treatise. Farewell, Most Serene Prince, and love me more and more each day, and I shall be yours, truly I shall be your Servant. Given at our home, on the 15th day of May, 1653.

FABER.