Page:Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus Vol I (IA cu31924092287121).djvu/203

 mockery but a cause of contempt. What we here omit we will give in the Herbary.

The younger and less full of years herbs are the more do they excel in their force and their faculties. For just as man is enervated by old age, and fails in his natural powers, so also is it with herbs.

But in order to know what is the chiromancy, and what the age, of herbs and similar bodies, long experience is required, since the number of years is not written upon them but has to be divined solely by chiromancy, as we have said. Now chiromancy supplies, not numbers, not letters, not characters, only lines and veins and wrinkles, as a means of reckoning the age. The older anything is the larger and more visible are the lines exhibited, and the virtue and operation of the thing are less active. For as a disease of one month or one year is more easily cured than one of two, three, four, five months or years, so a herb of one year more quickly cures its disease than one of two or three years. And on this account for old ills young herbs and those which have fewer years should be given, but for recent ailments old herbs and medicines should be administered. For if old be joined to old, the blind leads the blind and both fall into the ditch. This is the reason why many medicines are inoperative. They are in the body and they fill the limbs, but only as mud sticks to the shoes. Hence the diseases are often doubled.

Now here is a matter which, up to this time, has never been thought out by unskilled sophists, while by their ignorance they have lost more patients than they cured. The very first thing you physicians ought to know is that the medicine must always be younger than the disease, in order that it may get the better of it, and be stronger in expelling it. If the medicine be more powerful than the disease, the disease will be expelled, as fire will be extinguished by water. If the disease be more powerful than the medicine, that medicine turns into a poison, and afterwards diseases are redoubled and made more severe. Thus, if the disease be of iron, the medicine must be steel. Steel cannot be conquered by iron. The more powerful conquers, the weaker is subdued.

Although, therefore, it was no part of my original plan to write in this place anything about medicine, still, for the sake of true and genuine physicians, I could not pass by these matters in silence.

Minerals and metals, apart from fire and dry material, show their indications and signs which they have received at once from the Archeus and from the higher stars, each one telling its genus by differences of colour and of earth. The mineral of gold differs from the mineral of silver. So the mineral of silver differs from the mineral of copper. The mineral of copper differs