On the Tincture of Gold or True Potable Gold

served its weight) place in a crucible in the fire. Take care, however, that the material or metal does not melt, but let it merely glow darkly with the crucible for the space of three or four weeks: which being done, remove it again and weigh the metal anew, and in reality, you will experience the evident increase of your metal: which you will perceive more evidently by the following reason; place copper or another sulphurous metal with 16 or 18 parts of lead in a cupel, perfectly burnt, made from wood or bone ashes, in a docimastic furnace (having first observed most exactly the weight of the cupel, the copper, and the lead) and make the copper vanish with the lead by fire (but not an excessive one): which being done, remove the cupel when it has cooled, and weigh it again, and you will find it far heavier and weightier, so that its weight (however much lead may have also departed into the air in cupellation) exceeds not only its own pristine weight but also that of the copper and lead after the cupellation has been performed. It is therefore asked, with reason, whence this increase proceeds; whether the heat of the fire has not been coagulated into a metallic body by the benefit of that metal? It seems, therefore, probable that if we knew how to find metallic matrices on the surface of the earth, in which the sun’s rays and the heat of fire could be received and coagulated, metals could be generated in them just as in the bowels of the earth.

But you insist that it is likely that the heat of ordinary fire carries with it something metallic, which occurs by the benefit of the attraction of the fused metal into a cor-