Till that earnestly wished-for time, I bid you farewell." One result of the alchemical modes of expression was, that he who tried to follow the directions given in alchemical books got into dire confusion.

He did not know what substances to use in his operations; for when he was told to employ "the homogeneous water of gold," for example, the expression might mean anything, and in despair he distilled, and calcined, and cohobated, and tried to decompose everything he could lay hands on.

Those who pretended to know abused and vilified those who differed from them.
In _A Demonstration of Nature_, by John A.Mehung (17th century), Nature addresses the alchemical worker in the following words:-- "You break vials, and consume coals, only to soften your brains still more with the vapours.

You also digest alum, salt, orpiment, and altrament; you melt metals, build small and large furnaces, and use many vessels; nevertheless I am sick of your folly, and you suffocate me with your sulphurous smoke....

You would do better to mind your own business, than to dissolve and distil so many absurd substances, and then to pass them through alembics, cucurbits, stills, and pelicans." Henry Madathanas, writing in 1622, says:-- "Then I understood that their purgations, sublimations, cementations, distillations, rectifications, circulations, putrefactions, conjunctions, calcinations, incinerations, mortifications, revivifications, as also their tripods, athanors, reverberatory alembics, excrements of horses, ashes, sand, stills, pelican-viols, retorts, fixations, etc., are mere plausible impostures and frauds." The author of _The Only Way_ (1677) says: "Surely every true Artist must look on this elaborate tissue of baseless operations as the merest folly, and can only wonder that the eyes of those silly dupes are not at last opened, that they may see something besides such absurd sophisms, and read something besides those stupid and deceitful books....