Please be aware that in the centuries since this book was written, medical science has progressed. The medical treatments and medicines recommended in this book should only be used under guidance of a trained medical professional. Many of the medicines suggested are now known to be deleterious to your health or poisonous.
Archaic, obsolete and inconsistent spellings have been included as in the original book. When this book was written, English was just beginning to distinguish between I and J, and U and V. There are many words where these letters will appear to be transposed.
Most of the archaic and obsolete spellings are homophones for the spelling used today, however there were some notable exceptions:
| Word in book | Current spelling | |
|---|---|---|
| Filbeards | Filberts | |
| flowre | flour | |
| Jeat | Jet | |
| Jngat | Ingot | |
| malitious | malicious | |
| pretious | precious |
Research indicates that “Archeus” and “Archeius” are inconsistent spellings of the same word.
The words “cachymie”, “cachymia” and “cachyma” do not appear in any of the usual sources for English words. They appear to be attempts to Anglicize the Latin word “Cachymia” (pl. “Cachymiæ”), which Paracelsus used to mean an “imperfect metallic body”.
In the mobile versions of this text, where a planet appears in square brackets, the original book had the appropriate astrological symbol instead. In versions of this book without images, the first letter of each chapter or section will appear offset. In the version with images, these offset letters are replaced by drop-caps.
In the original book, the first letter of some words was in italics, while the rest of the word was in normal font. This has been maintained in the HTML and e-book formats, however these specific italics were dropped in the text version of the book.
In the original book, in the sub-book On the Nature of Things, the page numbering went from 104 to 107, with no 105 and 106 intervening. The catch-word on page 104 matched the first word of 107 and the text appeared to continue on 107 from the gist on 104. This and other sources indicate that 105 and 106 were skipped. In this e-book, the pages in On the Nature of Things have been renumbered from 107 to the end of the sub-book to make the page numbering continuous.
The Table of Contents was moved to the front of the book and expanded to cover the entire book. It was originally located between A Treatise of Sulphur and On the Nature of Things, and only covered the twelve treatises of A New Light of Alchymie and A Treatise of Sulphur.