Gold Not Gold

L.16.c.16.

L.29.c.3.

L.19.c.1.

L.10.c.3.

L.7.c.2.

Agr.occ.ph. l.1.c.20.f.

Riof.ich.anat. P.155.

Par.parag. c. de philol. Que. refp. ad Aub.p.31.

Lib.com.met l.1.c.1.

Moref.met. c. P.33.

Querc.ib.

Hor.l1. fat.7.

Quer. tetrad. c.32. Refp.ad Aub. ib. & post.

lives, but dies outside; why, as the hardness of box-wood, so also woods and garments, the sprinkling of an egg protects from fire; why the living linen of India, asbestos incombustible, shines better from injury by fire, lives by burning, and is not consumed by asbestos inextinguishable fires; why the Aetites eagle-stone loses nothing in fire; why, finally, the thumb on the right foot of Pyrrhus, the healer of the spleen-afflicted, was not consumed with the rest of the cremated body; just as the little bone of our thumb, called Luz the almond/the indestructible bone by the Hebrews, the seminary of our resurrection, is subject to no corruption, nor overcome even by fire; and the family of the Hirpii, in the annual sacrifice, walking over a burnt heap of wood, are not burned; if faith is to be had in those, according to Pliny, and in the penultimate of Agrippa and the younger Riolanus. But if one should favor the elements of the chemists more (whose homogene homogeneous things I would place as two Greek terms, amasian ignorance, anaisthan insensibility, and two Latin, to be foolish, to deceive), all metals (as all things) since they consist, according to Paracelsus, of salt, sulphur, and mercury (but Quercetanus, Libavius, and others do not have salt), and fire destroys, blackens, alters, and burns minerals on account of the mixed sulphur, either there will not be sulphur in gold, and so there will be one principle in gold, quicksilver, and thus one from one; or the fire will behave badly toward gold, because it has sulphur. But because for Quercetanus no perfect metal can be called such unless the sulphur itself has been separated from it, gold alone is asserted to be stripped of all sulphur, by which reason it is immune from all corruption, both in fire and outside fire. (Would that it corrupted as little as it is not corrupted.) Behold, an argument brought against the stated reason, but equally true, as if Bacchius were not better joined with Bithus.--
For he himself, after Paracelsus, teaches how to extract from gold three principles: vitriol or salt, sulphur, and mercury, if the wine is left suffering, and that metaphorical (quicksilver) sulphur brimstone acting, and that not common; is salt not to be named even in the principles of gold? Thus they fight among themselves; thus let others fight against them. But that those aerial, or fiery ones, should harden, that they should congeal, seems difficult, if not a wonder. But they themselves