Page:The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism.djvu/136

120 also, a grain the sixth hundredth part of an ounce). This powder I involved in wax, scraped off a certain letter, lest, in casting it into the crucible, it should be dispersed, through the smoak of the coals; which pellet of wax I afterwards cast into the three-cornered vessel of a crucible upon a pound of quicksilver, hot and newly bought; and presently the whole quicksilver, with some little noise, stood still from flowing, and resided like a lump; but the heat of that argent vive was as much as might forbid melted lead from recoagulating. The fire being straightway after increased under the bellows, the metal was melted; the which, the vessel of fusion being broken, I found to weigh eight ounces of the most pure gold.

"Therefore, a computation being made, a grain of that powder doth convert nineteen thousand two hundred grains of impure and volatile metal, which is obliterable by the fire, into true gold.

"For that powder, by uniting the aforesaid quicksilver unto itself, preserved the same, at one instant, from an eternal rust, putrefaction, death, and torture, of the fire, howsoever most violent it was, and made it as an immortal thing, against any vigour or industry of art and fire, and transchanged it into the virgin purity of gold; at leastwise one only fire of coals is required herein."

By which ye see that so learned and profound a philosopher as The Author could not so easily have been made to believe that there existed a possibility of transmutation of base metals into pure gold, without he had actually proved the same by experiment.

Again, let the standing monuments, Temples and Lasamaries of the Adepts and Lamas, to be seen in India every day, stand as a testimony to the truth of the existing possibility of transmutation. Likewise, I mention a stone that I saw, and had in my possession, which cured all disorders, the plague not excepted. I shall relate the circumstances, which are as follow:—

"There was a certain Master Lama, whose name was Katub, being some time at a Mosque in the Northwest Province of India with Ka Lama Moomntaj, he being in the Temple of the Syunbia-Zurija, and taking pity on one Maillius, a certain Franciscan Monk, a most famous preached of Gallo-Britain, having an erisipelas in his arm; on a certain evening, when the Monk did almost despair, he swiftly tinged a certain little stone in a spoonful of almond-milk, and presently withdrew it thence. So he says to the keeper—'Take this supping to that Monk; and how much soever he shall take thereupon, he shall be whole, at least within a short hour's space.'—Which thing even so came to pass, to the great admiration of the keeper and the sick man, not knowing from whence so sudden health shone upon him, seeing that he was ignorant that he had taken any thing: for his left arm, being before hugely swollen, fell down as that it could scarcely be discerned from the other. On