Page:The Canterbury tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.djvu/247

 to tell you the names of iron scales, of orpiments and burnt bones, that be ground full fine into powder? And how all is placed in an earthen pot, and salt put in, and also, before these powders that I speak of, paper and many other things, and well covered with a plate of glass? And how the pot and glasses are sealed with clay, that naught of the air may pass out? And of the easy and eke the brisk fire which was made, and of the trouble and the woe that we had in sublimating our substances, and in the amalgaming and the calcining of quicksilver, called crude mercury. For all our sleights, we cannot attain unto our end. Our orpiment and our sublimed mercury, our litharge eke ground on a porphyry slab—to use of these a certain number of ounces of each helpeth us naught; our labour is in vain. Nor may the vapourizing of our spirits, nor eke the substances that remain thereafter, avail us aught in our working; for lost is all our labour and toil, and lost also, in twenty devil ways, is all the money which we stake upon it.

There be eke full many other things that pertain unto our craft ; though I cannot rehearse them in their order, because I am a skilless wight, yet will I tell them as I call them to mind, though I cannot set each in its class : as Armenian clay, borax, verdigris, sundry vessels made of glass and earth, our pots, our descensories, vials, sublimating vessels, crucibles, gourds, alembics and other such vessels, dear enough at a leek's worth. It needeth not to rehearse every one: reddening waters, bull's gall, arsenic, sal ammoniac, and brimstone; and eke many an herb could I tell, as agrimony, valerian, lunary, and other such if I list to take the time. Our lamps are burning both day and night to bring about our end, if may be.

We have eke our furnaces for calcination and for the albifi-