Gold Not Gold

Card. subt. l. 5.

Scal. exer. 272

a leaden sword may be enclosed. But most solid. How is this certain? Does it not become more fragile than an eggshell when smeared with mercury? Is it not mastered by hammers? Is it not liquefied by King's water aqua regia or separation? Indeed, if it is most solid, how can it be cooked by our stomachs, conquered, altered into chyle, and soon into chyme? But it is the first metal. In what way? In time? However the first age was golden, yet we have received that the sword was made from iron, that Adam dug the earth with iron, and that Tubalcain worked with copper and iron long before gold was dug up anywhere.
Gen. 3. & 4.

Ov. Met l. 1. 75.

Then harmful iron, and gold more harmful than iron,
Came forth. --

Libau. com. met. l. 1. p. 5.

Arist. met. l. 3. c. 7.

Mag. phys. per. l. 5. c. 1.

Ric. An. Corr. c. 16. p.

Is it by nature? If the father of metals is sulphur brimstone, and the mother is argentum vivum quicksilver/mercury for the chemists, and the more remote matter is a viscous and moist vapor for the Peripatetics, which is matured by delay in its mines, so that it is frequently baked from silver into gold; according to Richard the Englishman, if it is not gold that has not first been silver; certainly if it is not silver, then quicksilver is prior to gold by nature; and if the cruder are prior to the more cooked, then lead and tin will be prior to gold.

Card. subt. l. 6.

Moref. met. cau. p. 14.

Is it by order? If the seven metals are rightly compared to the seven planets by Cardano; indeed if they take their names from them for the chemists, so that lead is called Saturn, copper or tin is Jupiter, iron is Mars, gold is Sol, bronze is Venus, electrum or quicksilver is Mercury, silver is Luna (although by the nature of the thing, silver is called Luna by Paracelsus, quicksilver rather plumbum lead, and lead Saturn); whether you enumerate them in direct order or retrograde,
Par. mor. met. l. 3. tr. 2. c. 4.

Claudian.

Mart. l. 1. ep. 58.

Is it finally by dignity? Here if anywhere, it exerts itself (under Phaëton, I fear)

Golden axle --
-- golden pole, golden the curvature of the highest
Wheel. --
Ovid. Met. l. 2.

Indeed the golden Solar bodies, as if the Sun is alone, the leader of the orbs, the light of lights,