As for metals worked up by art, separated through fire, and refined, I myself say that nature needs more labour for them. The powerful fire has driven away their superfluous moisture, however much they possessed, though more from one than another. Hence nature requires a very long operation to throw them back into first matter. Gold and silver have been deprived of almost all their moisture, as well as sulphur, arsenic, and marcasite, and have in part been enclosed and concentrated. Iron and copper, by contrast, can be destroyed sooner by nature and made into rust and crocus, because they contain superfluous moisture, stand very open, and can readily be brought into verdigris and rust by moist air and water. So too lead and tin, which become a paste. Experience has even shown that gold and silver buried beneath the earth have been awakened, when saline moisture in the earth aroused their acid spirit to act; consequently, instead of gold and silver, their electra or even dust have been found. If gold and silver are placed where many arsenical fumes or marcasitic vapours are exhaled, nature destroys them sooner. We see the same thing in art, which must follow nature through these same necessary degrees. Sulphur, arsenic, and a marcasite are melted together and allowed to flow, and red-hot gold is then introduced, so that the gold becomes nothing but powder in it. Salts, saline fumes, or spirits then immediately dissolve this and reduce it to its first state.

So it is in all things: when, by nature or art, they encounter what is congenial to them, they acquire their preserving or destroying agent. Without it they remain a long time in their being, until something of this kind arrives, as it surely will sooner or later. Nature does not long stand still: she makes one thing and breaks another, until the term appointed for it by God. If this field were not so extensive, I would plainly show everyone how nature herself accomplishes transformations of things, leaving no doubt about the transmutation of one into another. Examples have been inserted here and there in this treatise and the first, and the argument can also be drawn from them. For if the elements can be changed into one another—heaven or fire into air, air into water, water into earth, and conversely—then their offspring must also be capable of transformation into one another, since they arise from these very elements. The difference lies only in the manner of fixing and volatilizing. Yet no one should think that I teach here that one can change a devil into an angel or conversely, or that we intend to make something from nothing. No: we take only things produced by nature, separate them into certain parts, and put those parts together as nature herself instructs and demonstrates, showing us examples. I could give such transformations here, though not metallic ones that make gold from copper or lead; rather, transformations like nature's, when she makes plants from minerals and animals from plants. But I reserve this for a future treatise, if the world proves worthy of it, so that everyone may see it and grasp it with their hands.

Here an Aristotelian will want to see how I mean to prove that a cow can become an ass, an ox a human being, a human being an ox, and an ass a cow. To satisfy him, in honour of the learned world and our art, I must untie this knot. If an ass is to become a cow, it would be easily done if the cow ate an ass, or the ass a cow. But since the food of cows and asses is vegetable, we must first transform the ass or cow into a plant and then give one to the other to eat. Let the ass or cow putrefy beneath fresh earth, so that it manures the earth. Plants grow from this; give them to either animal to eat. The ass, having become vegetable, will be changed into a cow in the cow's archeus; or the cow into an ass. As for how an ox becomes a human being: we eat beef daily and change it into our human substance, so that the whole ox lays aside its bovine specification in us and is completely transmuted into human substance, retaining not the least trace of the bovine. For if the ox remained an ox within us and did not lay aside its form, we human beings would, through continually eating beef, have to become nothing but oxen. The same applies to other transmutations. If a human being is to become an ox, the human must putrefy in the earth and become a plant. The ox must eat this plant, and thus the human being is transmuted.

But the Aristotelian will say: 'The chymists do not mean transformation through an intermediary in this way. Rather, by means of their tincture they immediately make gold and silver from all the different metals.' He does not understand the nature of ores; otherwise he would judge differently. For the tincture is an intermediary. It does not cure the whole metal as it grows in the ore, but only its purest mercurial part, which much strong fire has purified of all slag. All learned people know that the philosophers do not take ore from the mountains and throw their tincture upon it. First they use fire to separate the superfluous corrosive moisture from the ore, then sulphur and arsenic, and then marcasite. Only afterward do they take the malleable metal, which has had to be separated from so many parts. In the great smelting furnace, the superfluous moisture, sulphur, arsenic, and volatile marcasite rise as smoke into the air and universal chaos. The remainder, the more fixed marcasite together with the mountain-mother or stone, becomes partly slag and partly a regulus. They separate the regulus again by liquation from the more fixed realgars, which they also call slag, until they obtain the pure metallic grain. The philosophers take this and, with their overripe tincture, transmute it into something better: gold and silver;

and this transmutation may rightly be called a cure of metallic disease. Thus lead has melancholy, tin contraction, iron bile and bitterness, copper a hot liver, mercury epilepsy, and silver dropsy. Their medicine, of a tempered solar nature, cures these diseases. For metals seem to me no different from marrow in bones. When a person has melancholy, their marrow too is infected; when another has bile, the marrow is likewise infected. A physician directs his medicine toward the marrow, rather than toward the bones and flesh. If he can cure the marrow, he will certainly cure the other diseases too, because marrow is the most remote part of the whole body. Hence the medicine must be penetrating, circulating through so many digestions and chambers until it reaches the marrow. Most medicines, especially vegetable ones, remain stuck at the third or fourth digestion; their force is dispersed in the veins and passes out again through the organs of evacuation, so that nothing penetrates to the marrow.

All human beings descend from the pure seed of a perfect, pure human being, yet they have acquired different forms, temperaments, qualities, and accidental diseases. Although all sprang from one seed, we see that no person is ever identical with another in temperament. So too all metals are born from a single seed, the universal acid. Through different matrices, however, they are hatched into different temperaments, shapes, or forms, and thus acquire their differences accidentally rather than materially. They are all metals, born from metallic seed; an accident distinguishes one from another, just as human beings differ in respect of accident, rather than nature. One is melancholic, another sanguine, the third phlegmatic, the fourth choleric, and the fifth has too much or too little of one of these. Thus Saturn is melancholic, the moon phlegmatic, Mars choleric, and Venus sanguine. They therefore need a tempered medicine to bring them into a balanced temperament, or solar matter, and raise them by art to a more perfect state of nature. The philosophers accomplish this through their medicine, curing refined metals into gold and silver, rather than ores.