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Most Noble, Most Excellent, and Most Learned

Lord, Patron and Most Honored Friend!

After I read through your treatise, which you rightly entitle a Philosophical Scrutiny, with voracious eyes, Most Excellent Lord Doctor, I hesitated in doubt whether to call it more congruent to truth or more ingeniously compiled; for whichever of these I say, it claims for itself excellence and dignity. And indeed, with respect to the first point, what I ask can be truer than that which is both agreeable to nature and adorned by the unassailable authorities upon which this scrutiny of yours rests? But with respect to the second, what could be more ingenious than to select from the inexhaustible labyrinth of enigmas only those things that remove the dense mist of an erring intellect and introduce the most serene light to the wanderers? So that, although the Greek Suetonius says that every land nourishes its own art, this divine art, by the method you have employed, has been recorded in these times of ours in very few lands. For which reason, it will not be out of place to say:

The author follows the bee, which, flying through wide fields,
Takes sweet honey from various flowers.

Otherwise, from these most ingenious writings of yours, it is right to conclude that those who are unskilled in true, most natural physics will be gnashing their teeth, partly driven by envy and partly blinded by ignorance. Of such kind are especially those who, not knowing the true properties of the Philosophical fire, are occupied with coal fires,