From thence, I went to the witches and wizards; such as pretend to cure man and beast by charms, words, amulets, characters: and these were all burning alive. “These,” says a devil, “are a company of cozening rogues; the most accursed villains in nature. If they help one man, they kill another, and only remove the disease from a worse to a better: and yet there’s no great clamour against them neither; for if the patient recover, he’s well enough content, and the doctor gets both reputation and reward for his pains. If he dies, his mouth is stopped, and forty to one the next heir does him a good turn for the dispatch. So that, hit or miss, all is well at last. If you enter into a debate with them about their remedies, they’ll tell you, they learned the mystery of a certain Jew; and there’s the original of the secret. Now to hear these quacks give you the history of their cures, is beyond all the plays and farces in the world. You shall have a fellow tell you of fifteen people that were run clean through the body, and glad for a matter of three days to carry their puddings in their hands; that in four-and-twenty hours he made them as whole as fishes, and not so much as a scar for a remembrance of the orifice. Ask him, when and where? you’ll find it some twelve hundred leagues off, in a _terra incognita_, by the token, that at that time he was physician in ordinary to a great prince that died about five-and-twenty years ago.” “Come, come,” cried a devil, “make an end of this visit, and you shall see those now that Judas told you were ten times worse than himself.” I went along with him, and he brought me to a passage into a great hall, where there was a damned smell of brimstone, and a company of match-makers, as I thought at first; but they proved afterward to be alchymists, and the devils examining them upon interrogatories, who were filthily put to’t, to understand their gibberish. Their talk was much of the planetary metals; gold they called Sol; silver, Luna; tin, Jupiter; copper, Venus. They had about them their furnaces, crucibles, coal, bellows, clay, minerals, dung, man’s blood, powders, and alembics. Some were calcining, others washing, here purifying, there separating. Fixing what was volatile in one place, and rarefying what was fix in another. Some were upon the work of transmutation, and fixing of mercury with monstrous hammers upon an anvil. And after they had resolved the vicious matter, and sent out the subtler parts, that they came to the coppel, all went away in fume. Some again were in a hot dispute, what fuel was best; and whether Raymund Lullius his fire, and no fire, could be anything else than lime; or otherwise to be understood of the light effective of heat, and not of the effective heat of fire. Others were making their entrance upon the great work, after the hermetical method. Here they were watching the progress of their operations, and making their observations upon proportions and colour.