At the age of fourteen years, under the auspices of a grandfather, and with the full consent of his family, he devoted his attention to alchemy, which henceforth was the absorbing occupation of his life. Seeking initiation into the first principles of the art, he began by the study of Geber and Rhasis, believing they would supply him with a method of multiplying his patrimony a hundred fold. The experiments which he undertook during his costly tuition by these oracular masters resulted in the futile dissipation of eight hundred, or, according to another account, of three thousand crowns. He was surrounded by pretended philosophers, who, finding him wealthy and eager in the penetration of tantalising mysteries, proffered the secrets which they neither possessed nor understood, obtaining a fraudulent subsistence at the expense of the boy alchemist. Disappointed, but not discouraged, he dismissed these impostors at length, and devoted his concentrated attention to the works of Rupecissa and Archelaus Sacrobosco, whom he literally followed for a time in all his practical operations. Hoping to profit by the help of a prudent companion, he associated himself with a good monk with whom he experimented in concert for the space of three years. They rectified spirits of wine more than thirty times “till they could not find glasses strong enough to hold it.” These operations cost nearly three hundred crowns. For fifteen years he continued his preliminary experiences, and at the end of that time he had purchased a perfect knowledge of all the highways and byways of alchemical rogueries, and was intimately acquainted with an enormous variety of substances, mineral, metallic, and otherwise, which did not apparently enter into the composition of the stone philosophical. He calculates the cost of these experiences to have been roughly six thousand crowns. He had laboured in vain to congeal, dissolve, and sublime common salt, sal ammoniac, every variety of alum, and copperas. He even proceeded upon ordure, both of man and beasts, by distillation, circulation, and sublimation. These experiments, based on the literal interpretation of the allegories of the _turba philosophorum_, again resulted in failure, and at last discouraged beyond words at the loss of his time and his fortune, he betook himself to prayer, hoping to discover the aim of the alchemists by the grace and favour of God. In conjunction with a magistrate of his country, he subsequently endeavoured to compose the philosophical stone with sea salt as the chief ingredient. He rectified it fifteen times during the space of a year and a half without finding any alteration in its nature, whereupon he abandoned the process for another proposed by the magistrate, namely, the dissolution of silver and mercury by means of aquafortis. These dissolutions, undertaken separately, were left to themselves for a year, and then combined and concentrated over hot ashes to reduce their original volume to two-thirds.