There is another tract of Hermes Trismegistus, entitled “Tractatus Aureus de Lapidis Physici Secreto;” on which no less elaborate commentaries have been written. It professes to teach the process of making the _philosopher’s stone_; and, from the allusions in it, to the use of this stone, as a universal medicine, was probably a forgery of the same date as the emerald tablet. It would be in vain to attempt to extract any thing intelligible out of this Tractatus Aureus: it may be worth while to give a single specimen, that the reader may be able to form some idea of the nature of the style.
“Take of moisture an ounce and a half; of meridional redness, that is the soul of the sun, a fourth part, that is half an ounce; of yellow seyr, likewise half an ounce; and of auripigmentum, a half ounce, making in all three ounces. Know that the vine of wise men is extracted in threes, and its wine at last is completed in thirty.”[10]
[10] “Accipe de humore unciam unam et mediam, et de rubore meridionali, id est anima solis, quartam partem, id est, unciam mediam, et de Seyre citrino, similiter unciam mediam, et de auripigmenti dimidium, quæ sunt octo, id est unciæ tres. Scitote quod vitis sapientum in tribus extrahitur, ejusque vinum in fine triginta peragitur.”
Had the opinion, that gold and silver could be artificially formed originated with Hermes Trismegistus, or had it prevailed among the ancient Egyptians, it would certainly have been alluded to by Herodotus, who spent so many years in Egypt, and was instructed by the priests in all the science of the Egyptians. Had _chemistry_ been the name of a science, real or fictitious, which existed as early as the expedition of the Argonauts, and had so many treatises on it, as Suidas alleges existed in Egypt before the reign of Dioclesian, it could hardly have escaped the notice of Pliny, who was so curious and so indefatigable in his researches, and who has collected in his natural history a kind of digest of all the knowledge of the ancients in every department of practical science. The fact that the term chemistry (χημεια) never occurs in any Greek or Roman writer prior to Suidas, who wrote so late as the eleventh century, seems to overturn all idea of the existence of that pretended science among the ancients, notwithstanding the elaborate attempts of Olaus Borrichius to prove the contrary.