Whether imperfect metals can be reduced by art to the perfection of gold or silver

Chapter II

I take it as certain that gold cannot be made through the ingenuity of art in the same way it is produced in the viscerib. terrę bowels of the earth. We cannot have those vapors, those exhalations, and those conditions from which mercury and the sulfur of metals are composed in the earth's depths. Likewise, it is not in our power to have that earth where, in the depths of the earth, ☿ mercury and 🜍 sulfur adhere and with which they are glued together. It is through long concoctiones digestions or slow cookings that metals finally emerge.

I also deem it certain that gold or silver cannot be made from foreign things. Nothing can be composed except from things of its own nature and species. A lion is certainly not generated from the sperm of a horse, nor is the seed of a lion effective for generating a horse. Therefore, the seed of a metal is necessary to form a metal. The question, then, proceeds only in this sense: whether, through the industry of human ingenuity, ☿ mercury and other imperfect metals can be so perfected that they are transmuted into perfect gold or silver.

Some think this is impossible because metals, whether in their perfect or imperfect state, are already completely finished. They no longer exist in a state of potential to acquire the perfection of gold or silver. Furthermore, we do not have at hand what imperfect metals lack to be perfected into gold or silver. Where do we have perfect mercury? Where is the required metallic sulfur? Where is the suitable matter? And how do we know the proportionate measure of the mixture of said components pre-required by nature?

Finally, even if Princes, Kings, and Emperors do not lack money for expenses, nor the most skilled laborers for working, nor famous books or manuscripts of the philosophers treating such transmutation: yet we neither certainly know, nor do we see, any of them having arrived at the said transmutation of imperfect metal or mercury into gold. Indeed, not even Solomon himself, the wisest of all and adorned with infused knowledge of natural things, performed this transmutation, since he sent?