o spiritual gold, is free to
all; that it is, at once, the meanest and the most precious thing in the
whole Universe. Indeed, I think it quite probable that the alchemists
who penned the above-quoted passages had in mind the words of ISAIAH,
"He was despised and we esteemed him not." And if further evidence
is required that the alchemists believed in a correspondence between
CHRIST--"the Stone which the builders rejected"--and the Philosopher's
Stone, reference may be made to the alchemical work called _The Sophic
Hydrolith: or Water Stone of the Wise_, a tract included in _The
Hermetic Museum_, in which this supposed correspondence is explicitly
asserted and dealt with in some detail.

(1) _A Discourse between Eudoxus and Pyrophilus, upon the Ancient War
of the Knights_. See _The Hermetical Triumph: or, the Victorious
Philosophical Stone_ (1723), pp. 101 and 102.

(2) JACOB BOEHME: _Epistles_ (trans. by J. E., 1649, reprinted 1886),
Ep. iv., SE III.

Apart from the alchemists' belief in the analogy between natural and
spiritual things, it is, I think, incredible that any such theories of
the metals and the possibility of their transmutation or "regeneration"
by such an extraordinary agent as the Philosopher's Stone would have
occurred to the ancient investigators of Nature's secrets. When they
had started to formulate these theories, facts(1) were discovered which
appeared to support them; but it is, I suggest, practically impossible
to suppose that any or all of these facts would, in themselves, have
been sufficient to give rise to such wonderfully fantastic theories as
these: it is only from the standpoint of the theory that alchemy was
a direct offspring of mysticism that its origin seems to be capable of
explanation.

(1) One of those facts, amongst many others, that appeared to confirm
the alchemical doctrines, was the ease with which iron could apparently
be transmuted into copper. It was early observed that iron vessels
placed in contact with a solution of blue vitriol became converted (at
least, so far as their surfaces were concerned) into copper. This we now
know to be due to the fact that the copper originally contained in the
vitriol is thrown out of solution, whilst the iron takes its place. And
we know, also, that no more copper can be obtained in this way from the
blue vitriol than is actually used up in preparing it; and, further,
that all the iron which is apparently converted into copper c