thing, took further advice, and appointed a commission of ten learned
men, and persons of eminence, to judge and certify to him whether the
transmutation of metals were a thing practicable or no. It does not
appear whether the commission ever made any report upon the subject.

In the succeeding reign, an alchymist appeared who pretended to
have discovered the secret. This was George Ripley, the canon of
Bridlington, in Yorkshire. He studied for twenty years in the
universities of Italy, and was a great favourite with Pope Innocent
VIII, who made him one of his domestic chaplains, and master of the
ceremonies in his household. Returning to England in 1477, he
dedicated to King Edward IV. his famous work, "The Compound of
Alchymy; or, the Twelve Gates leading to the Discovery of the
Philosopher's Stone." These gates he described to be calcination,
solution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation,
cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and
projection! to which he might have added botheration, the most
important process of all. He was very rich, and allowed it to be
believed that he could make gold out of iron. Fuller, in his "Worthies
of England," says that an English gentleman of good credit reported
that, in his travels abroad, he saw a record in the island of Malta,
which declared that Ripley gave yearly to the knights of that island,
and of Rhodes, the enormous sum of one hundred thousand pounds
sterling, to enable them to carry on the war against the Turks. In his
old age, he became an anchorite near Boston, and wrote twenty-five
volumes upon the subject of alchymy, the most important of which is
the "Duodecim Portarum," already mentioned. Before he died, he seems
to have acknowledged that he had misspent his life in this vain study,
and requested that all men, when they met with any of his books, would
burn them, or afford them no credit, as they had been written merely