But I will shut up the Tables, what I have hitherto spoken being sufficient for this time; from which I hope and believe that others will receive benefit: Which I heartily wish, together with the divine benediction to all pious men. Amen.
A
TREATISE
Of the Signature of
Salts, Metals, and Planets.
OR,
A Fundamental Institution evidently shewing by what means not only the Virtues, Signification, Nature, and Properties of Salts, Metals, and Planets, may be easily known, but also the reasons of their Names and Appellations, and this not from Books or Writings, but from their naked Signature, to be obtained and known by the help of the Circle and Quadrant.
Written for their sakes who delight in the Profitable and highly Necessary Contemplation of Divine Miracles.
To the well minded READER.
It is a common saying, Beware of those whom Nature hath marked, the which is indeed true, if it be understood concerning men who are insignized with some preternatural marks, or of the abortions of Nature, but concerning other things it is false. For the Almighty God hath signed all His Creatures, as well small as great, equally with their own certain signatures, and hath as it were subjected their depicted Lineaments to the Eyes of men, by which they might know what the nature and property of every thing is, and what Commodity and Profit it may bring to mankind. Hence not only all Vegetables, as Herbs, Shrubs, and Trees, but also Animals, as Beasts of every kind, yea, and Man himself, which abide upon the Earth, the Fishes inhabiting the Waters, and the Birds of the Air; but also all things moveable and immoveable, he hath signed with their peculiar forms and figures, to signifie to us by those their signs, of what use every Herb, every Animal, every Bird, and every Fish is, and for what purpose it serveth. And this is the Divine Inscription which the Divine Finger hath written upon all things, and by which the nature of all things should have been learned by us.
But after that Men began more and more to decline from the humane, to a brutish nature, and ceased to have the Reason of so noble a Signature, preferring their brutal Conceptions to the Divine Works, and postponing the Signatures incited in all things by Nature; it came to pass, that in a long process of time that true Signature, or Divine Inscription, being obscured, perished by degrees, and wholly vanished; so that but a very few are found in this Age, who are endowed with any knowledge of so great a Science; for the greatest part of men are wont to follow the duct of Books and Writings, and study to learn the Virtues and Proprieties of things out of them. Neither could this study be disapproved of, if the true, incorrupted, and entire Writings of the ancient and singularly-experienced noble Authors remained with us. But because in a long Series of time their frequent descriptions, emendations, and interpretations have so corrupted them, that scarce any thing of truth is to be found in them; it were far better that such mangled and corrupted Writings were not so much followed, but that rather that old foundation laid by God himself, upon which all those Writings, all Characters, and all Signatures do rest, and from whence they have received their beginning, should be again brought out of Darkness into Light, and the nature and properties of things learned from thence. This would be the true way of coming to the knowledge of Nature, in a short space of time, without so many errours, to which, by those false Writings, a man cannot come in many years.