When the question does arise, how the damsels will like this treatment, the doctor brushes it aside with imperturbable coolness. It will be a great honour to them, to be thus rendered conducive to the prolongation of male life. Indeed, it will cause them not to be held as cheap as they are now. At present they are good-for-noughts; but employed to infuse the breath of life into men’s lungs, they will be respected and valued. And now, with a flourish of horns, he introduces the “Wondrous discovery of philosophical chymistry,” of which he boasted on his title-page. “Now then, O ye cooks of Gebri, or, that I may give you your better title, ye sons of Hermes, who has taught you to extract the marvellous stone of the philosophers from the fire, that thereby ye may be skilled to sustain a protracted life! Now will I disclose to you a new philosophy! The once famous hermetic philosopher in France, Johann Petsus Faber of Montpelier, boasted of a certain _arcanum animale_ which would cause any one who used it to be free from injury caused by the inclemency of the weather, from the gray hairs of age, from exhaustion through bodily fatigue, or through mental tension, whom no sickness would enfeeble, but who would reach the term fixed by Providence for his days, free from injury from every foe. I shall prove that Hermippus protracted his life by the use of such an _arcanum_. For although, hitherto, it has been an unknown _arcanum_ to use the crude breath of little maidens for the prolongation of the mortal existence, still it will be regarded a far higher _arcanum_ if this can be concentrated and cooked into an essence by chymical process, so that it should have in itself the invisible spirit of nature, and the subtilised fundamental principle of life. Let no one consider what I am now about to relate as a fable, but let him hold it as genuine fact. In my youth I had the good fortune to have the _entrée_ of the house of an illustrious personage, whose lady was immeasurably learned in the hermetic science, and laboured at it along with her husband; with her I had the opportunity of discussing the primordial matter of universal substance, which the philosophers have veiled under enigma and fable. She boasted that she had learned the secret of this from an Italian _Adeptus_ at Rome, and thereby she aroused my curiosity to hear what it was: although, at the time, I was by no means slightly acquainted with hermetic philosophy. “Once, as I urgently besought her to do me the favour of disclosing to me this mystery, she began, after the manner of philosophers, to speak in similitude: she said the _ens spirituale_ was that without which no man could exist. It was common to all, to rich and poor alike. Adam brought it with him out of Paradise, and in it lay a nourishing principle of life attenuated in water and exhaled in air. I will not refer to other enigmas, which she knew how to propound from the writings of philosophers.