He looked about him now, and after a pause:-- "I suppose you do it--with these," he murmured, and with an almost imperceptible shiver he pointed to the crucibles.
"With those ?" Basterga exclaimed, and had the other ascribed supernatural virtues to the cinders or the bellows he could not have thrown greater scorn into his words.

"Do you think I ply this base mechanic art for aught but to profit by the ignorance of the vulgar?
Or think by pots and pans and mixing vile substances to make this, which by nature is this, into that which by nature it is not! I, a scholar?
A scholar?
No, I tell you, there was never alchemist yet could transmute but one thing--poor into rich, rich into poor!" "But," Grio murmured with a look and in a voice of disappointment, "is not that the true transmutation which a thousand have died seeking, and one here and there, it is rumoured, has found?
From lead to gold, Messer Basterga ?" "Ay, but the lead is the poor alchemist, who gets gold from his patron by his trick.

And the gold is the poor fool who finds him in his living, and being sucked, turns to lead! There you have your transmutation." "Yet----" "There is no yet!" "But Agrippa," Grio persisted, "Cornelius Agrippa, who sojourned here in Geneva and of whom, master, you speak daily--was he not a learned man ?" "Ay, even as I am!" Caesar Basterga answered, swelling visibly with pride.

"But constrained, even as I am, to ply the baser trade and stoop to that we see and touch and smell! Faugh! What lot more cursed than to quit the pure ether of Latinity for the lower region of matter?
And in place of cultivating the _literae humaniores_, which is the true cultivation of the mind, and sets a man, mark you, on a level with princes, to stoop to handle virgin milk and dragon's blood, as they style their vile mixtures; or else grope in dead men's bodies for the thing which killed them.

Which is a pure handicraft and cheirergon, unworthy a scholar, who stoops of right to naught but the goose-quill!" "And yet, master, by these same things----" "Men grow rich," Basterga continued with a sneer, "and get power?
Ay, and the bastard sits in the chair of the legitimate; and pure learning goes bare while the seekers after the Stone and the Elixir (who, in these days are descending to invent even lesser things and smaller advantages that in the learned tongues have not so much as names) grow in princes' favour and draw on their treasuries! But what says Seneca?
'It is not the office of Philosophy to teach men to use their hands.