digestion; in the baser metal the coction has not been such as to
purge out its metallic impurities. If by any means this superfluous
impure matter could be organically removed from the baser metals, they
would become gold and silver. So miners tell us that lead has in many
cases developed into silver in the bowels of the earth, and we contend
that the same effect is produced in a much shorter time by means of
our Art."

Stories were told about the finding of gold in deserted mines which
had been worked out long before; these stories were supposed to prove
that gold was bred in the earth. The facts that pieces of silver were
found in tin and lead mines, and gold was found in silver mines, were
adduced as proofs that, as the author of _The New Pearl of Great
Price_ says, "Nature is continually at work changing other metals into
gold, because, though in a certain sense they are complete in
themselves, they have not yet reached the highest perfection of which
they are capable, and to which nature has destined them." What nature
did in the earth man could accomplish in the workshop. For is not man
the crown of the world, the masterpiece of nature, the flower of the
universe; was he not given dominion over all things when the world was
created?

In asserting that the baser metals could be transmuted into gold, and
in attempting to effect this transmutation, the alchemist was not
acting on a vague; haphazard surmise; he was pursuing a policy
dictated by his conception of the order of nature; he was following
the method which he conceived to be that used by nature herself. The
transmutation of metals was part and parcel of a system of natural
philosophy. If this transmutation were impossible, the alchemical
scheme of things would be destroyed, the believer in the transmutation