only arrogates to itself the power of developing, through the removal of all defects and superfluities, the golden nature which the baser metals possess." Bonus, in his tract on _The New Pearl of Great Price_ (16th century), says: "The Art of Alchemy ...

does not create metals, or even develop them out of the metallic first-substance; it only takes up the unfinished handicraft of Nature and completes it....
Nature has only left a comparatively small thing for the artist to do--the completion of that which she has already begun." If the essence were ever attained, it would be by following the course which nature follows in producing the perfect plant from the imperfect seed, by discovering and separating the seed of metals, and bringing that seed under the conditions which alone are suitable for its growth.

Metals must have seed, the alchemists said, for it would be absurd to suppose they have none.

"What prerogative have vegetables above metals," exclaims one of them, "that God should give seed to the one and withhold it from the other?
Are not metals as much in His sight as trees ?" As metals, then, possess seed, it is evident how this seed is to be made active; the seed of a plant is quickened by descending into the earth, therefore the seed of metals must be destroyed before it becomes life-producing.

"The processes of our art must begin with dissolution of gold; they must terminate in a restoration of the essential quality of gold." "Gold does not easily give up its nature, and will fight for its life; but our agent is strong enough to overcome and kill it, and then it also has power to restore it to life, and to change the lifeless remains into a new and pure body." The application of the doctrine of the existence of seed in metals led to the performance of many experiments, and, hence, to the accumulation of a considerable body of facts established by experimental inquiries.