“Yet it was matter of consolation to me to discourse and entertain myself with her, and to think what we should do to find out the interpretation and meaning thereof. “At length I caused to be painted within my chamber, as much to the life or original as I could, all the images and figures of the said fourth and fifth leaves. “These I showed to the greatest scholars and most learned men in Paris, who understood thereof no more than myself: I told them they were found in a book which taught the philosophers’ stone. “But the greatest part of them made a mock both of me and that most excellent secret, except one whose name was Anselm, a practiser of physic and a deep student in this art. “He much desired to see my book, which he valued more than anything else in the world, but I always refused him, only making him a large demonstration of the method. “He told me that the first figure represented Time, which devours all things, and that, according to the number of the six written leaves, there was required a space of six years to perfect the stone; and then, said he, we must turn the glass and see it no more. “I told him this was not painted, but only to show the teacher the _prima materia_, or first agent, as was written in the book. He answered me that this digestion for six years was, as it were, a second agent, and that certainly the first agent was there painted, which was a white and heavy water. “This, without doubt, was _argent vive_, which they could not fix; that is, cut off his feet, or take away his volubility, save by that long digestion in the pure blood of young infants. “For in that this _argent vive_ being joined with Sol and Luna was first turned with them into a plant, like that there painted, and afterwards by corruption into serpents, which serpents, being perfectly dried and digested, were made a fine powder of gold, which is the stone. “This strange or foreign discourse to the matter was the cause of my erring, and that made me wander for the space of one and twenty years in a perfect meander from the verity; in which space of time I went through a thousand labyrinths or processes, but all in vain; yet never with the blood of infants, for that I accounted wicked and villainous. “For I found in my book that the philosophers called blood the mineral spirit which is in the metals, chiefly in Sol, Luna, and Mercury, to which sense I always, in my own judgment, assented. Yet these interpretations were, for the most part, not more subtle than true. “Not finding, therefore, in my operation or course of the process, the signs, at the time written in my book, I was ever to begin again. “In the end, having lost all hope of ever understanding those symbols or figures, I made a vow to God to demand their interpretation of some Jewish priest belonging to some synagogue in Spain.