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susceptible os perpetual multiplication ; and which, bycontinued coction, ffiould have its power more and moreexalted, so as to be able to transmute greater and greaterquantities of the inferiour metals, insomuch that, ac-cording to its different degrees of perfection, one part ofit shall be sufficient for ten parts, a hundred parts, a thou-sand parts, twenty thousand parts, two hundred and se-venty two thousand three hundred and thirty parts ofbase metal.

If these pretensions were proposed as matter of specula-tion only, I believe no one, who has at all consideredthe nature of metals, could hesitate in pronouncing themabsurd : they are inconsistent even with the alchemicalphilosophy itself. But they are endeavoured to be sup-ported by arguments of another kind ; by historical rela-tions of the actual transmutation of all the common me-tals, strongly attested, not only by the alchemists them-selves whose testimony might be thought suspicious, butlikewise by persons supposed to have been entirely un-prejudiced, who had been casually favoured with somequantity of the transmuting powder, or who had beenwitnesses to its astonishing operation and to the immenseriches it had procured.

In regard to these narratives I shall only remark,that at a time when the transinutability of metals wasgenerally believed, the circumstances of certain princesmight render it an advantage to them to be thought tohave such an inexhaustible resource for wealth : thatsome pgrsons who, by methods which it was their interestto conceal, had acquired sudden riches, might, in thisart, find plausible means of giving an account for them ;that many of the supposed alchemists have been con-victed, and perhaps many others guilty, of imposture $the gold, which they pretended to have made, having

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