The lure and romance of alchemy / by C.J.S. Thompson.

  • Charles Thompson
Date:
[1932]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The lure and romance of alchemy / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    196/300 page 174
    The water obtained is mixed with the prepared calx of gold and water added. Then digest it in warm ashes and keep it at a gentle heat for fourteen days. Water is then added, and it is again dis¬ tilled and redistilled until the gold comes over. To this spiritualized solution of gold, rain water is added, and three parts of mercury. Then decant the water and dry the amalgam. Drive off the quicksilver, and there will remain a very fair powder of a purple colour. Then must be made the Tartar of the Philosophers from the ashes of the vine and make a strong Lee with it to coagulation, and there remains a reddish matter, and this dissolve in spirit of wine. Then take the other part of mercury of pure gold and pour this on it and distill. The precipitated mercury and the oyl of gold are then to be mixed and placed in a glass and hermetically sealed and put into a threefold furnace and allowed to putrify for a month and become quite black. Increase the fire and the blackness will vanish, and it changes into many colours. Increase the fire to the fourth degree and the glass will look like silver. Increase the fire to the fifth degree and it becomes like gold. Continue this and you will see your matter lye beneath like a brown oyl which at length becomes dry like granite. He that obtains this may render thanks to God, for poverty will forsake him. For this noble medicine is such a stone to which nothing in the world may be compared for virtue, riches, and power. He goes on to say that if this medicine after being fermented with other pure gold doth likewise tinge [dye] many thousand parts of all other metals into very good gold, such gold likewise becometh a penetrat medicine that one part of it doth tinge and transmute a thousand parts of other metals and much more beyond belief into perfect gold. Valentine’s process apparently consisted in coating—or, as he calls it, tingeing—the baser metals with a gold amalgam and so giving them the appearance of the precious metal, and by re¬ peating this process he thought the whole of the base metal might be converted into gold. We find that this idea was ex¬ ploited by the pseudo-alchemists at a later date, and that by its means they succeeded in duping many of their patrons.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3