Contemporary with Khunrath there was another initiated doctor, Hermetic philosopher and disciple of Paracelsian medicine; this was Oswald Crollius, author of the _Book of Signatures, or True and Vital Anatomy of the Greater and Lesser World_.[272] The preface to this work is a sketch of Hermetic philosophy, exceedingly well done; Crollius seeks to demonstrate that God and Nature have, so to speak, signed all their works, that every product of a given natural force bears the stamp of that force printed in indelible characters, so that he who is initiated in the occult writings can read, as in an open book, the sympathies and antipathies of things, the properties of substances and all other secrets of creation. The characters of different writings were borrowed primitively from these natural signatures existing in stars and flowers, on mountains and the smallest pebble. The figures of crystals, the marks on minerals, were impressions of the thought which the Creator had in their formation. The idea is rich in poetry and grandeur, but we lack any grammar of this mysterious language of worlds and a methodical vocabulary of this primitive and absolute speech. King Solomon alone is credited with having accomplished the dual labour; but the books of Solomon are lost. The enterprise of Crollius was not a reconstitution of these, but an attempt to discover the fundamental principles obtaining in the universal language of the creative Word. It was recognised on these principles that the original hieroglyphics, based on the prime elements of geometry, corresponded to the constitutive and essential laws of forms, determined by alternating or combined movements, which, in their turn, were determined by equilibratory attractions. Simples were distinguished from composites by their external figures; and by the correspondence between figures and numbers it became possible to make a mathematical classification of all substances revealed by the lines of their surfaces. At the root of these endeavours, which are reminiscences of Edenic science, there is a whole world of discoveries awaiting the sciences. Paracelsus had divined them, Crollius indicates them, another who shall follow will realise and provide the demonstration concerning them. What seemed the folly of yesterday will be the genius of to-morrow, and progress will hail the sublime seekers who first looked into this lost and recovered world, this Atlantis of human knowledge.