absurd. No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his
past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such
advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its
past folly and credulity. And not only is such a study instructive: he
who reads for amusement only, will find no chapter in the annals of
the human mind more amusing than this. It opens out the whole realm of
fiction -- the wild, the fantastic, and the wonderful, and all the
immense variety of things "that are not, and cannot be; but that have
been imagined and believed."

BOOK I.

THE ALCHYMISTS; OR, SEARCHERS FOR THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE AND THE
WATER OF LIFE.

"Mercury (loquitur). -- The mischief a secret any of them know,
above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they
may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or
bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against
nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were
to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate,
their precipitate, and their unctions; their male and their female,
sometimes their hermaphrodite -- what they list to style me! They will
calcine you a grave matron, as it might be a mother of the maids, and
spring up a young virgin out of her ashes, as fresh as a phoenix; lay
you an old courtier on the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring,
and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a
pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their
forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!" -- Ben
Jonson's Masque "Mercury vindicated from the Alchymists."