To Myself I Am Only A Child

Thus You May Multiply Each Stone 4 Times & No More For They Will Then Become Oyles Shining In Ye Dark And Fit For Magicall Uses. You May Ferment Them With Gold And Silver, By Keeping The Stone And Metal In Fusion Together For A Day, & Then Project Upon Metalls. This Is The Multiplication Of Ye Stone In Vertue. To Multiply It In Weight Ad To It Of Ye First Gold Whether Philosophic Or Vulgar.

To Explain All Nature Is Too Difficult A Task For Any One Man Or Even For Any One Age. Tis Much Better To Do A Little With Certainty & Leave The Rest For Others That Come After Than To Explain All Things By Conjecture Without Making Sure Of Any Thing.

[1.] And First I Suppose That There Is Diffused Through All Places An Aethereal Substance Capable Of Contraction & Dilatation, Strongly Elastick, & In A Word, Much Like Air In All Respects, But Far More Subtile. 2. I Suppose This Aether Pervades All Gross Bodies, But Yet So As To Stand Rarer In Their Pores Then In Free Spaces, & So Much Ye Rarer As Their Pores Are Less ... 3. I Suppose Ye Rarer Aether Within Bodies & Ye Denser Without Them, Not To Be Terminated In A Mathematical Superficies, But To Grow Gradually Into One Another.

The Latest Authors, Like The Most Ancient, Strove To Subordinate The Phenomena Of Nature To The Laws Of Mathematics.

The Changing Of Bodies Into Light, And Light Into Bodies, Is Very Conformable To The Course Of Nature, Which Seems Delighted With Transmutations.