Philosophical Scrutiny of the True Elixir of Life

is accustomed to, and ought to, imitate the method and order of its Creator, and yet true artists command that one must follow this very process and order of nature most exactly in making the Elixir, then I too, both by observing the practice of Chemical Philosophy and by writing this little treatise, will take my start from the darkness in which the majority of chemists have hitherto wandered after the death of Theophrastus Paracelsus, and then I will proceed into the clearest and most splendid light. I say darkness, for from the death of Theophrastus until the present time, darkness dominated with respect to this our natural, or rather divine, science. A medicine succumbed to the most desperate diseases from