The Anatomy of Melancholy

Those remarkable instruments and mechanical inventions of Jacques Besson and Cardano for such purposes, with many similar experiments suggested long ago by Roger Bacon in his treatise On the Secrets of Art and Nature: making a carriage move without an animal; diving boats; walking on water by artifice and flying through the air; making various cranes and pulleys “by which one man may draw a thousand men towards himself”; lifting and moving great weights; mills that move themselves; Archytas’s dove, Albertus’s brass head, and other such wonder-working devices.

But above all, performing extraordinary wonders with glasses, of which Proclus and Bacon wrote long ago: burning glasses, multiplying glasses, perspective instruments, “so that one man appears an army”; seeing far away; representing solid bodies by cylindrical and concave surfaces; walking in the air; “so that they really see,” says Bacon, “gold and silver and whatever else they wish, and when they come to the place where the image appeared, find nothing.” These glasses have lately been greatly improved by Giambattista della Porta and Galileo, and Maginus and Midorgius promise much more to be accomplished in this field.

Some speak of hearing instruments to strengthen hearing as the others do sight. Marcellus Vrencken, a Dutchman, mentions in his letter to Burgravius a friend who is working on an instrument “with which he will see what lies on the other horizon.”

But our alchemists and Rosicrucians, I think, offer the greatest marvels and are richest in experiments: they can make gold, separate and transform metals, extract oils, salts, and residues, and perform more extraordinary works than Geber, Lullius, Bacon, or any of those earlier masters.

Following his master Paracelsus, Crollius has made “fulminating gold,” or “volatile gold,” which will imitate thunder and lightning and explode more loudly than any gunpowder. Cornelius Drebbel has made a perpetual-motion device, inextinguishable lights, cloth that will not burn, and many similar wonders; see his book On the Nature of the Elements. Besides hail, wind, snow, thunder, lightning, and so forth, there are those extraordinary fireworks, devilish petards, and similar engines of war derived from these arts, about which you may read Tartaglia and others.

Ernestus Burgravius, a disciple of Paracelsus, has published a discourse describing a lamp to be made from human blood. He calls it “a lamp that indicates life and death.” Chemically prepared for forty days and afterwards kept in a glass vessel, it will reveal all the changes in that person’s life: “If this lamp is bright, the man is cheerful and healthy in body and mind; if cloudy and dim, he is unwell; and so it varies with the condition of the man from whom the blood was taken.” Most wonderful of all, it dies with the person: “It perishes and vanishes with the man.” The lamp and the man whose blood supplied it are extinguished together.