Pretiosa margarita novella de thesauro, ac pretiosissimo philosophorum lapide : artis huius divinae typus, et methodus: collectanea ex Arnaldo, Rhaymundo, Rhasi, Alberto, et Michaele Scoto

* his natural mirror to count even the divine John the Evangelist among the authors of this art, perhaps for the reason that this science is posited as divine. The divine apostle himself, in the presence of the philosopher Crato, seeing those two youths (who had given everything to the poor for the love of Christ) groaning and sighing because they saw themselves destitute in a cheap cloak and saw their own servants most powerful and shining, commanded them, when they desired to recover the wealth they had given away, to bring him straight twigs in single bundles and small stones from the seashore. Having invoked the Trinity, he converted the former into the purest gold and the latter into precious gems. But that (in my judgment) is in no way attributed to this art, although divine, but only to a divine miracle. Because the apostle chose a matter too disparate for the art, and although he had chosen the proper matter, a single action (as will be said below) does not make an author. What of Raymond Lull, whose life and genius are a wonder to all? He, indeed, tried to demonstrate the impossibility of this art against Arnaldus de Villa Nova with the most powerful arguments. But after Arnaldus showed the truth of the art not by arguments but by experience, Lull began to search for it with all his effort; having found it with no small labor, and wishing to open its truth to the incredulous, he demonstrated it in nearly five hundred volumes. To these he added that most recent and wonder-worthy work on precious stones, which he commanded to be composed from these very same principles of metals, a work at which nature itself stands amazed. Nor was he content with this, that he would change all metals into gold, but he even made the gold itself recede into the substance and nature of lead, against the order of nature. Hear, I pray, another thing, which is scarcely perceived by human intellect, how in the same piece of metal