Why should not gold—of whose genesis our scientists know so little—have been originally a primitive or _basic matter of gold_, a ponderous fluid which, as says Van Helmont, “from its own nature or a strong cohesion between its particles, acquired {51} afterward a solid form?” There seems to be very little absurdity to believe in a “universal _ens_ that resolves all bodies into their _ens genitale_.” Van Helmont calls it “the highest and most successful of all salts; which having obtained the supreme degree of simplicity, purity, subtilty, enjoys alone the faculty of remaining unchanged and unimpaired by the subjects it works upon, and of dissolving the most stubborn and untractable bodies; as stones, gems, glass, earth, sulphur, metals, etc., into red salt, equal in weight to the matter dissolved; and this with as much ease as hot water melts down snow.” It is into this fluid that the makers of malleable glass claimed, and now claim, that they immersed common glass for several hours, to acquire the property of malleability. We have a ready and palpable proof of such possibilities. A foreign correspondent of the Theosophical Society, a well-known medical practitioner, and one who has studied the occult sciences for upward of thirty years, has succeeded in obtaining what he terms the “true oil of gold,” _i.e._, the primal element. Chemists and physicists have seen and examined it, and were driven to confess that they neither knew _how_ it was obtained nor could they do the same. That he desires his name to remain unknown is not to be wondered at; ridicule and public prejudice are more dangerous sometimes than the inquisition of old. This “Adamic earth” is next-door neighbor to the alkahest, and one of the most important secrets of the alchemists. No Kabalist will reveal it to the world, for, as he expresses it in the well-known jargon: “it would explain _the eagles_ of the alchemists, and how the eagles’ wings are clipped,” a secret that it took Thomas Vaughan (Eugenius Philalethes) twenty years to learn.