Epistola de lapide philosophorum (Letter on the Philosopher's Stone, 1559)

is dry and cold, and water is cold and moist; these two elements continge? touch/meet only in coldness: Therefore, the dryness of the earth within the stone coheres from its own humidity, because it is joined outwardly by the depth of coldness which is common between the dryness of the earth and the humidity of the water, and also by the immission? injection/insertion and into the moist mixture? to be united: and thus it becomes exterior water. And the divine Philosopher Aristotle affirms in many places that generation always occurs from a contrary, in common, and finally going? to being, it cannot happen maximally from one extreme to another except through a medium: Which element indeed, having been reprehended? examined/tested, is said to be the first, and he speaks well of it as the very matter of the diligent metallurgists. Hence he said: Behold, you have water from air, air from fire, and fire from earth. You will fully have the nature which will not only need that proper digestion, which, mediating and common from their power, brings the impurest of nature to the act of formal acria? sharpness/acidity and substance. Which, without doubt, when it immits? those things near to bodies, the first, corrupts its own nature to seek the form of which? is proved reprehensible?. For once dried and purged?, it is soon sublimated for you, purified, and thus dissolved in water as an example of proportion? multiplying: by the opinion of Aristotle's words it is unified, as he said that from one handful of earth, ten handfuls of water are made: and from one handful of water, ten of air are made: and from one handful of air, ten of fire are made: and therefore these two are all very noteworthy, and when this produces water, that which is called precious to vegetable animals? organic life, to have a coagulated and fixed lapidem stone, which is from the four elements: Which Mercurius Mercury indeed, thus dissolved, is cooked for three months in a decanting period? for the space of four months in a double vessel?. And in the same stove, in the same furnace, place, and fire, there will be another of virtues, and efficacy, you take the size of a man, by embracing the similarity of the aforementioned and conferring it to have divine virtue, rejoicing together, and in such a way adapted? that the lesser, with respect to itself, devours the medium of that greater one, and has its nature as two things of one, which is the greatest, and it has in its worldly machine. Now you arise to the act and to the fates? of the aforementioned body further, and by bursting forth from these, rather, clothed by its heat from air increased more: and that lesser [fire] ignites the greater, so that thus prepared you may arrange to confer my regiam royal medicine, greater. For if you exist as matter vacant of that water, it is maximally coagulated: when in the arrival of air, one less dwelling? from bodies, it is more coagulated, and since this air in solution makes it first conquer, let it be of diverse common? coagulation, making; therefore the maximum?