Fridrichstadt Leisure, or the Chemical Tantalus

Epistle

To a certain most Illustrious, most Excellent and most Experienced Chemist, a great Friend.

There is a common proverb: in the whirlpool where you least believe, there will be the fish. By this proverb, I refer to the art of chrysopoeia gold-making, of which I gave some very brief lineaments in that treatise which I cast onto paper in Friedrichstadt in Holstein in the month of May of the current year 1717, among six hundred impediments and annoyances, which I call my leisure, so that I would not waste the time that remained without some labor and so that I would have something by which to delight my mind, and thus by this writing this Treatise was born. For if anyone induces his mind to read it through, perhaps in this whirlpool also, if not a great one, he will nevertheless find some little fish.

Having returned home, and a little later, a certain learned man, not so seriously as for the sake of a joke, wanted to fob off vitriol as the matter of the L. P. B., not indeed with the intention that he would subscribe to this opinion any longer, but induced by the authority of the formerly renowned Petrus Maria Caneparius, who in his Treatise on Inks, a book of great weight and more than ordinary praise, from which he once had three chapters, namely XLVI, XLVIII, and L, described at great price, and seduced by the persuasion of this, he instituted labors in Vitriol, as he who in these chapters seemed to describe Vitriol enigmatically, and from this manuscript, as he says, he could elicit nothing else than that the oil of Vitriol should be instilled into its salt and simultaneously coagulated, etc. But so that I might lead this most learned man, my very dear friend, back from this crossroads to the royal road which leads to the art, as it seems to me, I have added these few things to my Treatise. Although I have rejected Vitriol in my other Treatises before this, it pleases me to refute this absurd opinion again with these few words, since many are stuck in this mud. For I, as it was told to me, know two Doctors of Medicine of illustrious fame, who both also wander on this string; the other is said to have elicited quicksilver from vitriol, to which, if those things which a few days ago I read in the