Three-hundred-letter collection

Use in the book

Page 142 lists the costs of assembling it: much travel, labour, expense, and some danger to his life. These are marks of acquisition and experience rather than passive possession of an ordinary volume. Page 143 differentiates several levels of engagement. A highly learned person may not even know the letters; a fire-artist must read them Nature-conformingly; harder still is recognizing the ink, its ingredients, and Nature's manner of decocting it. The contrast between knowing and recognizing reappears within the metaphor itself.

The passage asserts a result: this book has taught Khunrath more truth than many unprofitably written books and is especially useful for recognizing and demonstrating the first matter of metals and catholic Magnesia. It is not offered as an exhaustive survey of natural things. Nearly three hundred is the size of the claimed collection of letters, not a declared total for Nature. The earlier page 29 says the world-book cannot be studied to its end.

The modern interpretation as a specimen collection is attractive because travel, gathering, natural letters, and chymical reading suggest material things. Yet the primary pages leave the inference incomplete. They do not tell us how the letters were stored, classified, displayed, or labelled. A precise lexicon can explain the practice imagined by the passage while distinguishing an evocative collecting claim from an independently documented cabinet or surviving inventory.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 29The wider world-book is inexhaustible, limiting any inference that three hundred letters exhaust Nature.
2. 1599 p. 142Khunrath claims to have assembled the book through travel, labour, cost, and danger.
3. 1599 p. 143Knowing letters, reading them by fire-art, and recognizing their ink form successive levels of understanding.
4. 1599 p. 143 · marginThe ink inquiry is reconciled with the earlier statement that weights and measures belong to Nature.

Translation in this edition

The Errata correction from literæ to literas is adopted in the supplied body. 'Nearly three hundred' should remain approximate. 'Specimen collection' is the modern note's interpretation, and appears here as an explicitly attributed possibility rather than a literal translation of the source's Buch.