During his confinement he composed a treatise on the philosophical stone, and the Diary of Dr Dee was published from a genuine Ashmolean manuscript in 1604. The son of John Dee became physician to the Czar at Moscow, and in his _Fasciculus Chemicus_, he states that, in early youth, he witnessed transmutation repeatedly for the space of seven years. The metrical account of Sir Edward Kelly’s work in the _Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum_ informs all who are broiling in the kitchen of Geber to burn their books “and come and learn of me,” for they can no more compound the _Elixir Vitæ_ and the precious stone than they can manufacture apples. The progenitor of magnesia, wife to the gold of the philosophers, is not a costly thing. The philosophical gold is not common but Hermetic sulphur, and magnesia is essential mercury. The _Testamentum Johannis Dee Philosophi Summi ad Johannem Gwynn, transmissum 1568_, is lucidly worded as follows in its reference to the _magnum opus_:-- “Cut that in Three which Nature hath made one, Then strengthen yt, even by it self alone; Wherewith then cutte the powdered sonne in twayne, By length of tyme, and heale the wounde againe. The self same sonne troys yet more, ye must wounde, Still with new knives, of the same kinde, and grounde; Our monas trewe thus use by Nature’s Law, Both binde and lewse, only with rype and rawe, And aye thank God who only is our Guyde, All is ynough, no more then at this tyde.” FOOTNOTES: [X] Morhof, _Epistola ad Langlelotum de Metallorun Transmutatione_. HENRY KHUNRATH. This German alchemist, who is claimed as a hierophant of the psychic side of the _magnum opus_, and who was undoubtedly aware of the larger issues of Hermetic theorems, must be classed as a follower of Paracelsus. He was a native of Saxony, born about the year 1560. He perambulated a large portion of Germany, and at the age of twenty-eight received the degree of medical doctor at the University of Basle. He practised medicine at Hamburg and afterwards at Dresden, where he died in obscurity and poverty, on the 9th of September 1601, aged about forty-five years. The _Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ solius veræ, Christiano Kabbalisticum divino magicum_, &c., published in folio in 1609, is the most curious and remarkable of his works, some of which still remain in manuscript.[Y] It was left unfinished by its author, appearing four years after his decease, with a preface and conclusion by his friend Erasmus Wohlfahrt.