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

O crime, what do I hear, that this science, which is so supernatural, and this art, which is so rare, should today appear to many as an illusion and a deception?

Bonus. It is no wonder, since it happens that in this deplorable century, men of every kind, and indeed the most lazy, dare to seek out the hidden causes of this most happy and exalted philosophy of art and science, thinking they can extort and steal that most blessed stone from the paper-thin tangles and deceptions of certain ignoramuses. They are, indeed, smiths, wool-workers, wood-workers, and that type of melancholic men a reference to the medieval humor theory, linking madness or obsession to black bile desiring to be enriched without labor.

Lacinius. Do not the learned, the nobles, the princes, and finally the kings seek it similarly?

Bonus. What then? I myself know very many, but I have seen that they are not as they should be toward this most excellent science, but only greedy for gold, so that you would swear they are hard flints from which the gold itself is excavated, but you would say their hunger for gold is harder. And although you would judge them all to be very sharp-nosed in all things, in this matter you would say they have no nose at all, when you see them sometimes believing the most foolish chimeras and embracing ambiguous and false, empty and childish things for some great I-know-not-what, and now they prick up their ears to this stranger, now to that one, who, promising puffed-up and vain things, work daily in arsenics, sulphurs, solvents, and the like, most prompt and greedy, but ignorantly and ineptly, who finally conclude with this end, that they waste their own time and make others waste theirs, and thus they squander money for acquiring the stone, and finally, when they see they have been frustrated in their purpose, they try "the herb sought from afar, to make the fleeting silver stand in powerful juice" a quotation from Virgil's Eclogues, referring to the absurdity of their efforts.

Lacinius. O, minds so slow and accustomed to be deceived by the various leading of things through the emptiness of the craftsmen, what do these things have to do with metals? But alas, how far we wander from the point.

Bonus. Not at all,