I can speak from bitter experience, for I, too, toiled for many years ...

and endeavoured to reach the coveted goal by sublimation, distillation, calcination, circulation, and so forth, and to fashion the Stone out of substances such as urine, salt, atrament, alum, etc.

I have tried hard to evolve it out of hairs, wine, eggs, bones, and all manner of herbs; out of arsenic, mercury, and sulphur, and all the minerals and metals....

I have spent nights and days in dissolving, coagulating, amalgamating, and precipitating.

Yet from all these things I derived neither profit nor joy." Another writer speaks of many would-be alchemists as "floundering about in a sea of specious book-learning." If alchemists could speak of their own processes and materials as those authors spoke whom I have quoted, we must expect that the alchemical language would appear mere jargon to the uninitiated.