OF THE MINERAL WORK.

On the Rise & Birth of Metals.

Decorative woodcut initial 'Q' containing a grotesque face surrounded by swirling floral patterns.
Regarding the origin of metals and minerals, namely from what matter they were originally generated in the bowels of the earth and how they arrived at such fixity, many and varied opinions have always existed, so that the student of this difficult science has been kept in suspense as to whom he should give his assent and according to which Philosophy natural science he should institute his own. And since in the whole world, among so many nations, so many men of high and low degree, both literate and illiterate, strive to extract their happiness from metals today, and nothing profitable can be obtained without the true knowledge of them—for how, I ask, will anyone convert an imperfect metal into a better one if he is ignorant of the parts of which it is composed, into which it must be resolved before it can attain a nobler form; and since knowledge of generation is very necessary for their improvement—we shall briefly examine what is to be thought concerning their birth.

Although almost the entire chorus of Philosophers alchemists/naturalists, though very succinct in their writings, testifies in obscure and enigmatic ways that metals are generated in the bowels of the earth by the power of the stars from above, there are those who argue quite ignorantly that metals possess no seed at all, such as is present in other Vegetables plants and Animals, and that therefore they have no power of propagating themselves, but that they were produced by God in the womb of the earth at the first creation of things. But this is too gross and palpable a hallucination, which can most easily be refuted by daily experience, which proves the contrary. For when these things are searched out by miners and brought to light from the earth, we perceive with our eyes that they still grow daily, and do not cease this motion unless they are deprived of their vegetative virtue and life by external accidents: which itself proves this opinion to be erroneous. There are those who teach that God, when he founded the world, did not instill the metals themselves, but only the seed of them into the matrix of the earth for their propagation: if this were so, this seed would long ago have completed its vegetation and provided a new harvest of itself, of which there are no traces anywhere. It must be known, therefore, that the nature of metallic seed is far different from that of the seed of Vegetables plants and Animals, which is perceptible to the senses of eyes and hands.