Gold Not Gold

But this, to Scaliger, is the purest fervor, it consumes nothing, but rather perfects many things. The terrestrial is left to the chemist, who yields as much to them,
Bartal ib.877

-- as torches to Phoebus,

as he says. This becomes the aid of aids, as the form of forms is the soul, as the hand is the instrument of instruments, it becomes the instrument of the arts, so that it may congregate homogeneous things, so that it may separate heterogeneous things, cook, attenuate, mix, and bring forth many things, act on many things, active most of all, by heat, rarity, subtlety: yet it does not consume more, I do not say ebony, but ashes, than most refined gold. This Doctor himself, if he had been truly golden, not merely waxy, would have undergone, sustained, and endured the fervor of the examination, I do not say the ash-like one, more willingly and strongly. Indeed, if he himself had been as strong, as solid, (I add) as wise, as the gold which he puts forward, even if he had yielded somewhat to fire, mercury, vinegar, salts, for a time, for show, for the opinion of men, like a fleeing, fighting Parthian; nevertheless, he would have long since returned to himself, perhaps fiercer, certainly more fruitful; and he would not have lost a granule of substance, weight, or estimation. Now that it is diminished, the fire is extinguished, the gold is withdrawn, a heavenly water is feigned, the liquor is tinged with gold, a little of the thing is added, much to the fraud, little to the fame. But this element is said to be tempered in gold, with the hot perfectly balanced with the cold and the moist with the dry.

Hic.pag.28.

Let him beware of black coal from his coal-men, who would either calculate or think that those elements or temperaments exist. For whether they are, or are others; and how many and what kind they are; their mixis mixture, krasis temperament, syzygiai conjunctions, metabolai transmutations, actions, reactions; whether they are in mixed things, or in act, or in potency, or forms, or qualities, or whole through wholes, or through parts; however worn they are in the schools of Physicists, and the alphabet of medicine; to illiterate chemists they are either unspeakable, or unheard of. But how the element in gold, as the hot, or the eukrasia aurares golden good-temperament, protects against fire, he will resolve no more easily than why the Pyrausta fire-insect lives in fire,

Plin. nat. hist. l.11.c.36.