LULL, Ramon & ALBERTUS MAGNUS

De Secretis naturae sive Quinta essentia libri duo. His accesserunt, Alberti Magni Summi philosophi, De mineralibus & rebus metallicis Libri quinque

      Quae omnia solerti cura repurgata rerum naturae stuidosis recens publicata sunt per M. Gualtherum H. Ryff, Argentinensem. Medicum. Eight woodcuts in the text. 4 p.l., 183, [4] leaves. 8vo, cont. limp vellum (light browning), three (of four) ties. [Strasbourg: B. Beck], 1541. First edition of this collection of texts to be edited by Walter Hermann Ryff (d. 1548), the prominent city physician of Nuremberg, surgeon, and author of many medical, anatomical, surgical, pharmacological, culinary, and technological books. This is a very rare book with no copy in OCLC. The first part of this book contains a treatise in two books on various quintessences (leaves 1-56), of which one could transmute one hundred parts of mercury into gold or silver. It is a Lullian version of the De Consideratione Quintae Essentiae by Joannes de Rupescissa (1st ed.: Venice, 1514). Now considered spurious, this treatise had enormous influence on the development of alchemy and is regarded as one of the most authoritative texts on the quinta essentia. !Although Lull himself was opposed to alchemy...his methods had obvious applications in the alchemical field ! and they were so applied in a host of pseudo-Lullian alchemical works, most of them composed more than fifty years after his death. These works explain the traditional (but false) !scientific! view which made him !Lull the Alchemist!.!!D.S.B., VIII, p. 550. The remainder of the book contains Albertus Magnus! De Mineralibus, his principal work on mineralogy, metallurgy, and chemistry; it is one of the best and most comprehensive of the western medieval lapidaries and was written about 1260. !He seems to have experimented with alchemy and is said to have been the first to isolate the element arsenic. He compiled a list of some hundred minerals, giving the properties of each. During his many travels, he made frequent sidetrips to mines and excavations in search of specimens. He was acquainted with fossils, and made accurate observations of !animal impressions! and improved on Avicenna!s account of their formation. Albert suggested the possibility of the transmutation of metals, but he did not feel that alchemists had yet found the method to bring this about.!!D.S.B., I, p. 101. The woodcuts depict distillation equipment. Fine copy in original state. A much more common second edition appeared a year later in Venice. ❧ Duveen, p. 369. Ferguson, II, p. 54!(no copy in Young collection). .