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Book 2 On the Growth of Natural Things
Latin witness: Frankfurt 1605, printed pp. 206–208, SUB Göttingen PPN578052199. Source facsimile: https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN578052199?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B190%5D%7D
Heat and moisture are the cause of things’ growth.
It is sufficiently evident and known to everyone that all natural things grow and mature through heat and moisture, as rain and the sunshine that follows it sufficiently demonstrate. No one can deny that rain makes the earth fertile, and everyone must acknowledge that the sun matures all fruits. Since this is nature’s requirement according to divine ordinance, who will object or refuse to believe that a human can do it too through the prudent and skilful diligence of alchemical art: make the unfruitful fruitful, the immature mature, and cause everything to grow and increase? Scripture says that God subjected all created things to humanity and placed them in human hands as a possession, to be used for human need, granting dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and everything on earth without exception. A person should therefore rightly rejoice that God has so enlightened and endowed humanity in the light of nature that all God’s creatures are compelled to obey and be subject to it, especially the entire earth and everything born, living and moving in and upon it. We see with our own eyes, and daily experience teaches us, that the more often and abundantly rain moistens the earth and the sun dries it again with its heat and fervour, the sooner the earth’s fruits emerge and mature. All fruits thus grow and increase, whatever the season. Let no one henceforth be surprised that an alchemist can do the same through repeated imbibitions and distillations. What is rain but an imbibition of the earth? What are the sun’s heat and warmth but the sun’s distillation, by which it draws such moistures up again? I therefore say it is possible by such cooperation to produce beautiful green plants, flowers and other fruits in midwinter, through earth and water, from seed and root. If this happens in all plants and flowers, it will also happen in many similar things, namely all ores whose imperfect metals can be matured through mineral water by a skilful alchemist’s diligence and art. Likewise all marcasites, garnets, zineta, arsenics, talcs, cachymiae, bismuths, antimonies and so forth, which all carry immature Gold and Silver within them, can be matured by such cooperation alone until they equal the richest veins of gold and silver. Elixir and the tinctures of metals are likewise matured and perfected.
The artificial maturation of things.
God has subjected all things to humanity.
The artificial generation of fruits.
The maturation of ores.
Beard and nails grow in the dead.
Since moisture and heat mature everything and make it grow, as stated, no one should be surprised that the beard, hair and nails of an evildoer on the gallows or wheel grow after a long time. Nor should it be held a sign of innocence, as the unskilled judge: it is natural and flows from natural causes. As long as moisture remains in a person, the nails, beard and hair grow. More than that, the nails, beard and hair of a person buried in the earth grow until the second year or until that person’s putrefaction, and so forth.
It must also be understood that many things continually grow and increase in size, weight and virtue in water and earth, where their qualities and efficacy are also preserved: metals, marcasites, cachymiae, talcs, garnets, antimony, bismuth, gems, pearls, coral, all stones and clays. Gold too can be made to grow and increase in weight and body if it is merely buried in earth facing east and continually fertilised with fresh human urine and pigeon dung.
The augmentation of Gold.
How to bring about the generation of Gold in a cucurbit.
How the philosophers’ tree is made.