hands, they were persuaded, from reading them, that highly rectified
spirits of wine was the universal alkahest, or dissolvent, which would
aid them greatly in the process of transmutation. They rectified the
alcohol thirty times, till they made it so strong as to burst the
vessels which contained it. After they had worked three years, and
spent three hundred crowns in the liquor, they discovered that they
were on the wrong track. They next tried alum and copperas; but the
great secret still escaped them. They afterwards imagined that there
was a marvellous virtue in all excrement, especially the human, and
actually employed more than two years in experimentalizing upon it,
with mercury, salt, and molten lead! Again the adepts flocked around
him from far and near, to aid him with their counsels. He received
them all hospitably, and divided his wealth among them so generously
and unhesitatingly, that they gave him the name of the "good
Trevisan," by which he is still often mentioned in works that treat on
alchymy. For twelve years he led this life, making experiments every
day upon some new substance, and praying to God night and morning that
he might discover the secret of transmutation.

In this interval he lost his friend the monk, and was joined by a
magistrate of the city of Treves, as ardent as himself in the search.
His new acquaintance imagined that the ocean was the mother of gold,
and that sea-salt would change lead or iron into the precious metals.
Bernard resolved to try; and, transporting his laboratory to a house
on the coast of the Baltic, he worked upon salt for more than a year,
melting it, sublimating it, crystalizing it, and occasionally drinking
it, for the sake of other experiments. Still the strange enthusiast
was not wholly discouraged, and his failure in one trial only made him
the more anxious to attempt another.