The Printer to the Reader.

It is not necessary for me to describe with a heap of idle words how easily Nature, the common mother of all things, presents herself to us daily, so that she deserves the title of most kind Mother by the best of rights. Yet I cannot help saying that Nature today exerts a more propitious influence than in times long past. Just as a true parent shows herself more humane to her offspring day by day, and the closer she herself comes to old age and death—following the footsteps of the elderly—the more she makes known what she had previously hidden and unfolds the secrets of her breast: so too does our most propitious mother, Nature, reveal herself more and more each day. Now, as if wavering toward her own end, she shows more clearly than the sun those things which until now had remained in obscurity. I do not call for witnesses in such a manifest matter. What virtues of herbs, shrubs, roots, and trees, once more secret, does Medicine not now experience more frequently? What spirits of metals and minerals has Chemistry not revealed? And in what other things has Nature not laid open to the art and ingenuity of men? And who could doubt it? If we wish to sharpen the edges of our minds, many things which are now either unknown or, when discussed, considered mere dreams, can yet be drawn from the bosom of Nature and clearly demonstrated. For the abyss of Divine Wisdom, which we touch in sublunary things just as we do in the celestial, has not yet been exhausted. Indeed, the greatest part of what we know is the least part of what we do not know. Hence it happens that in every part of the world, in every century, and indeed in almost every year, new fruits of genius emerge, bringing into the light things that were previously hidden. I speak of the present matter. Concerning the Sympathetic healing of wounds, a method almost new and unknown to the ancients, some have written quite learnedly for and against it in this century, following Paracelsus 16th-century physician and alchemist and Porta Giambattista della Porta, 16th-century polymath.