“call spirits from the vasty deep.” I resolved therefore to summon those of the most learned alchymists of the past, and to commune with them, that I might have the shades of these distinguished men before me while my lamp was burning,—nay, even while my efforts to transmute the baser metals into gold were progressing.
Firstly, I called up that great Arabian Alchymist, Gebir, who has been worthily called a “captayne and a prince of this science.” I found him affable and ready to give me any hints in his power, a great scholar and learned in all the sciences. His famous work the Summa Perfectionis, or Lapis Philosophorum, was of great assistance to me. My next visitor was our own countryman, Roger Bacon (1214–1292). I found his society all I could wish. A Franciscan Monk, but one who had evidently devoted more of his thoughts to alchymic research than to his religious duties, he held a most
