Friedrichstadt 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 a fish. By this proverb I refer to the art of chrysopoeia gold-making, of which I gave certain very brief outlines in that treatise which I cast onto paper in Friedrichstadt in Holstein in the month of May of the current year 1717, amid six hundred impediments and annoyances which I call my leisure, so that I would not waste the time that remained without some labor and that I might have something with which to delight my mind, and thus by this writing this Treatise was born. For if anyone is induced to read it through, perhaps in this whirlpool also, if he does not find a large fish, he will at least find some small one.

Having returned home and shortly after, a certain learned man, not so seriously as for the sake of a joke, wished to foist vitriol as the matter of the L. P. B., not indeed with the intention as if he subscribed to this opinion any longer, but induced by the authority of the formerly Petrus Maria Caneparius, who in his Treatise on Inks, a book of great weight and of rather significant praise, from which he once had three chapters, namely XLVI, XLVIII, & L, described at great cost, and seduced by the persuasion of this, he instituted labors in Vitriol, as one 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 was to be instilled into its salt and simultaneously coagulated, etc. But to lead this most learned man, a very dear friend to me, back from this crossroads to the royal road that leads to the art, as it seems to me, I have added these few things to my Treatise. Although before this, in my other Treatises, I have rejected Vitriol, it pleases me to refute this absurd opinion again with these few words, since many are stuck in this mire. For I myself, as I have been told, know two Doctors of Medicine of illustrious fame, who both also err on this chord; one is said to have elicited living mercury original: "mercurium vivum" from vitriol, to which if those things are added, which a few days ago in