The Author’s Preface

The kindly practitioner and enthusiast should observe that this treatise proceeds throughout quite simply according to nature herself, in theory and practice. Everywhere it shows and demonstrates the true underlying causes and reasons: how, in what manner, why, and out of what this or that arises and comes to be. It does so for this reason: if an artist does not know nature’s path, and does not know how nature works, he cannot possibly understand nature. He must instead fall blindly upon prescribed processes, carry them out, and fail in them repeatedly, because he understands neither nature’s rule nor her reason. For these reasons many thousands have travelled the road to temporal ruin, and many, out of despair, to eternal ruin as well.

From the present treatise, however, he should gain nature’s most beautiful and simplest order as a measured guide. It will fittingly show him the path of every generation and destruction of natural things, as clearly as one teaches children their ABC, and will tell him everywhere why this or that happens, how, in what manner, and to what end.

So that I do not linger over a very lengthy description of natural things, which various authors have already elaborated and adorned sufficiently, even excessively, in entire folios, I proceed very briefly, touching little on unnecessary matters, above all to spare the reader the annoyance caused by a mass of paper. It should also be observed that no ornament of eloquence or elaborate style is to be sought here, since I myself, a simple man, proceed simply according to the simplicity of nature herself.

Nor does it benefit a practitioner to attend to verbal ornament and long for beautiful, harmonious constructions. Rather, let him turn his concern to the good of his purse and health, so that with head and hands he makes theory practical through the practice presented here, bringing it into effect, visible and tangible. Otherwise, if it remains lodged only in a theorising brain, he may indeed call himself a disputant, but not a practitioner.

Whoever undertakes to consider the being of all natural things—their birth, life, and death—should and must carefully consider nature’s origin from beginning to end. That is, he must consider how and out of what nature brings forth, preserves, and again destroys the things contained here in the four elements, each thing in particular: meteors, universals, animals, plants, and ores; how nature dissolves them, coagulates them, dissolves them again, and regenerates them. For whatever nature makes, and whatever she makes it through, through that very same thing she destroys all things again.

Thus each thing carries its own coagulator and dissolver with it, its own life and death upon its back. Through one thing it is born and preserved, and through that very same thing it is again broken up and destroyed. For a different action and effect results according to the difference in the operation and the manner of operating.