Marengus — Chemical Pallas, ca. 1675 Multilingual MS

legates original: "Legat." to foreign provinces for the building and adorning of the Temple. He did this so they might transmit a great abundance of gold to him.

On the contrary, however, very many philosophers, venerable in science and integrity of life, and trustworthy in their doctrine, testify that the said transmutation of metals can be done, and has often been done. And since I am the least of them, while I was staying in Vienna, Austria, I saw common mercury turned and transmuted into the most perfect gold within a quarter of an hour. This happened while it was heated in the presence of the most invincible Emperor Ferdinand III. A certain medicinę medicine, here meaning an alchemical elixir was infused into it. However, no one knew how to compose it, because it was found in the house of a certain goldsmith who had died a few days earlier in Trento. Therefore, if Princes do not perform this transmutation of metals now, it does not imply that the art does not exist, but only that it is unknown and not found among those wise and prudent workers.

Therefore, although we do not have in individual form the mercury ☿ and the earth which nature uses

to produce metals in the bowels of the earth, we can nevertheless extract these three components from the metals themselves through art. We can mix and cook them perfectly and thus produce the best medicine for the said transmutation. However, these components are not drawn out from metals as they are commonly received, but from those that have been putrefactis rotted or broken down, refined, purified, and reduced to the materia prima first matter or the nature of mercury.

It is indeed beyond doubt that it belongs to God alone to create metals and their seeds. But to rot and multiply those created things belongs to nature and art. It belongs to art by its handling, and to nature by working through the components themselves. We effect nothing intrinsically: it is the nature of the components themselves that works, while we merely assist nature. A farmer does not produce or multiply the grain, but assists the nature of the wheat rotting within the earth so that it may produce and multiply grain. We, therefore, do not produce the seed of gold. We receive that which is produced by God and nature. But where nature stops, we begin, and by moving backward, we reincrudamus re-incrudate, or return a metal to its raw, "crude" state the gold symbol: ☉.