Chemical Investigation of the Difference Between Philosophical and Mineral Antimony, as well as Philosophical and Common Mercury

what are you, pray? You are total sickness and death itself, and yet you ignorantly turn up your nose at chemistry, an art invented by nature, and everywhere you call chemists smoke-sellers, ash-stirrers, coal-burners, counterfeiters, charlatans, triflers, and, what is worse, pseudo-physicians and empiric quacks. Beware hereafter lest you injure yourself, not knowing, lest after you have understood the matter you sing a palinode a poem retracting a former statement. Original: "non est prudentis dicere non putaram: de re incognita non potest ferri judicium, nisi perversum" It is not the act of a prudent man to say "I had not thought so." A judgment cannot be passed on an unknown matter, unless it be perverse. Therefore, the dignity of the chemical art was among the ancients, and now is among the moderns, and shall be among future professors of physics, despite all the insults of certain knaves and scoundrels.