Epistolary Form of Chemical Matters

the pillory are displayed the leaders of the parachymists, and the racks and tortures, or shameful flights and wicked desertions, are produced to the disgrace of the art. But ingenious and wise men have always distinguished between those who wrongly snatch and usurp for themselves the titles and honors of the art, and its legitimate and modest Professors. They are usually judged also by their singing and their manner of life. For those impostors throw about ampullas and ἁμαξιαῖα ῥήματα wagon-load sized words, and, fugitives from the workshop, they have crept in. He who was a perjured goldsmith, he who a lying astrologer and maker of calendars, he who a shepherd, or rather a pestilential and fugitive mercenary, he who was contaminated by organ-work, and others of this kind from the Lerna swamp: wherever they have seen a dream of a golden branch, and have stolen a mystical paper from a philosopher, or obtained one from an impostor, or have looked over the Germanisms of Paracelsus cursorily with squinting eyes, and can now stammer something about filters and other things, they immediately carry themselves as chemists and become "coal-burners" a derogatory term for incompetent alchemists behind their furnaces. Whatever comes out of them by chance, they immediately show it to the passersby and the ignorant as a chemical essence, and make a path to experience through the deaths of many.