This exposition, which appears as probable as any other, betrays the time when this celebrated inscription seems to have been really written. Had it been taken out of the hands of the dead body of Hermes by Sarah (obviously intended for the wife of Abraham) as is affirmed by Avicenna, it is not possible that Herodotus, and all the writers of antiquity, both Pagan and Christian, should have entirely overlooked it; or how could Avicenna have learned what was unknown to all those who lived nearest the time when the discovery was supposed to have been made? Had it been discovered in Egypt by Alexander the Great, would it have been unknown to Aristotle, and to all the numerous tribe of writers whom the Alexandrian school produced, not one of whom, however, make the least allusion to it? In short, it bears all the marks of a forgery of the fifteenth century. And even the tract ascribed to Albertus Magnus, in which the tablet of Hermes is mentioned, and the discovery related, is probably also a forgery; and doubtless a forgery of the same individual who fabricated the tablet itself, in order to throw a greater air of probability upon a story which he wished to palm upon the world as true. His object was in some measure accomplished; for the authenticity of the tablet was supported with much zeal by Kriegsmann, and afterwards by Olaus Borrichius. There is another tract of Hermes Trismegistus, entitled “Tractatus Aureus de Lapidis Physici Secreto;” on which no less elaborate commentaries have been written. It professes to teach the process of making the _philosopher’s stone_; and, from the allusions in it, to the use of this stone, as a universal medicine, was probably a forgery of the same date as the emerald tablet. It would be in vain to attempt to extract any thing intelligible out of this Tractatus Aureus: it may be worth while to give a single specimen, that the reader may be able to form some idea of the nature of the style. “Take of moisture an ounce and a half; of meridional redness, that is the soul of the sun, a fourth part, that is half an ounce; of yellow seyr, likewise half an ounce; and of auripigmentum, a half ounce, making in all three ounces. Know that the vine of wise men is extracted in threes, and its wine at last is completed in thirty.”[10] [10] “Accipe de humore unciam unam et mediam, et de rubore meridionali, id est anima solis, quartam partem, id est, unciam mediam, et de Seyre citrino, similiter unciam mediam, et de auripigmenti dimidium, quæ sunt octo, id est unciæ tres. Scitote quod vitis sapientum in tribus extrahitur, ejusque vinum in fine triginta peragitur.”