though it be a dream--say even, which no one can actually affirm--though it be an impossibility for the metal, is true for the man; and all that is beautiful and sublime in alchemical symbolism may be rigorously applied to the divine flower of the future, the young King of Humanity, the perfect youth to come, when he issues from the Spiritual East, in the dawn of the genuine truth, bearing the Crescent Moon, the woman of the future, upon his bright and imperial crest. I am of opinion, from the evidence in hand, that metallic transmutations did occur in the past. They were phenomena as rare as a genuine “materialisation” of so-called spirits is generally considered at the present day among those believers in physical mediumship who have not been besotted by credulity and the glamour of a world of wonders. Like modern spiritualism, the isolated facts of veritable alchemy are enveloped in a crowd of discreditable trickery, and the trade of an adept in the past was as profitable, and as patronised by princes, as that of modern dealers with familiar spirits. But the fact of an occasional transmutation gives little reason to suppose that the _praxis alchemiæ_ in metallic subjects is ever likely to succeed with modern students of the _turba philosophorum_. The enigmas of the alchemists admit, as I have said, of manifold interpretations. Their recipes are too vague and confused to be followed. They insist themselves that their art can only be learned by a direct revelation from God, or by the tuition of a master. Their fundamental secrets have not only been never revealed in their multitudinous treatises, but they scarcely pretend to reveal them, despite the magnificent assurances which are sometimes contained in their titles. The practical side of alchemy must be surrendered to specialists in chemistry, working quite independently of the books or the methods of the philosophers. Only the theory is of value to neophytes, or initiates, or to any student of the higher occultism; and it is of value, as I have said, because it can be applied outside the kingdom of metals, as the alchemists themselves acknowledge, and as some of them seem to have attempted.