XXIII

For example, if only a single small glass of spirit of wine alcohol were present mixed in a great vat full of water, and someone then wanted to elicit that small spirit through infinite distillations; surely, as the aforementioned wise ones excellently explained, his life would fail before he succeeded. Therefore the wise found only one single subject under the sun, as Senior says, from which they could draw out that spirit in its first universal state and the salt of nature, specified nowhere else, by an easy business. Hence Arnold, Avicenna, etcetera, all conclude nothing else except that the first matter of the Stone is a potential, spermatic, coagulable celestial vapor, and "gold in the making" original: "aurum in fieri". For this reason it is rightly called the "sperm of the earth," which name certainly fits neither regulus a metallic button nor any other metals at all. Thus it is also called "our egg" by some, because just as the egg of birds is a chick in the making, similarly our egg is gold in the making.

Likewise, since the wise also say that the Stone can be elicited from every thing, as Lullius and the Rosarius Aurificus The Rosary of the Goldsmiths explain, and where the simple are deceived, and ignorant lords original: "satrapi" boast that the philosophers are everywhere contradictory. For as Hilarius says in Book 8: "The human mind only knows what it understands." For this is to be understood in this way, as the aforementioned testify: namely, since our salt is called a Stone by way of similarity, because it is extracted from our dew in the form of small stones, and truly appears like little stones,