Nine Books on the Nature of Things

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.