On the True Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Order of Freemasons

...to whom he helped collect herbs and prepare medicines, and from whose writings by Paracelsus he also occasionally read aloud. The great fame of the latter caused Thurneisser to resolve to accomplish similar things and to become just as famous through chemistry, combined with astrological and theosophical whims, especially since he did not lack intellectual curiosity, nor knowledge of metallurgy, botany, drawing, and the like; but he had no formal schooling original: "Schulſtudia", so that he only learned Latin in the 46th year of his life. His travels through England and France in 1548 and 1549, to Scotland in 1560, to Spain and Portugal in 1561, and then to Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Greece, etc., where he acquired some knowledge of Greek and some oriental languages, gave him the courage to try to equal a Paracelsus and to study nature from its works, while reading more books than the latter had read, who did not think much of book-reading at all. Thurneisser’s truly not insignificant knowledge of mathematics...