Instructions Respecting The Art Of Transmuting And Ameliorating The Metals

William Baron Von Shroeder · 19 pages · Esoteric & Occult · 1797 · read the volume

1 marked gaps. Both readers refuse on 0, both offer something on 1, and they disagree on 0.

Nothing on this page is the text. These books are served exactly as their editors left them, holes and all. Every restoration below sits beside the passage and never inside it, because an invented line of a lost book, once loose, is quoted forever.

3 readers, asked separately. Each was given the same passages and the same instructions, and none saw another’s answers. All were told that refusing was a complete answer and that a confident wrong restoration was the worst possible outcome.

Reader C came later, and blind. It was put only the 20 gaps on which the first two readers disagreed, mixed with 6 gaps both had refused, and was told nothing of either. On the disputed gaps it sided with the reader who refused 17 times and with the reader who restored 3; of the 6 controls it refused 6. Its willingness to answer is therefore not the explanation of its answers.

Where they disagree, both are shown. There is no ground truth for a line that burned in 612 BC. This library is not in a position to settle these, and pretending otherwise would be the same mistake as filling the hole.

285-001 · page 14

…ery gentle fire, which do not increase before you see it necessary, and a yellow subtile oil or sublimate will come over, which smokes constantly, and consumes metals like a fire. (This oil ameliorates silver in digestion, but it is too much volatilized therein, so that it must be refixed, and by these means you obtain a white gold or Luna Fixa. (Agricola says that the foregoing process is of Poppius; he adds that[missing]is blackened by this process but not enriched with gold, and that there is no benefit from this digestion. He adds that this Liquor has some rapport with Butyrum Antimonii, and that if you cohobate this yellow oil or sublimate several times upon its own faeces, your oil will become of a ruby color. If you distill this oil or sublimate from Emeril (iron) this matter will give you an oil as red as blood. Agricola says…
Every reader offers something

Reader A inference, high confidence

silver (the alchemical symbol for Luna)

The preceding sentence establishes the subject: "This oil ameliorates silver in digestion, but it is too much volatilized therein... you obtain a white gold or Luna Fixa"; the missing word stood where the manuscript had the planetary symbol for silver.

Reader B published, medium confidence

sense: Agricola's objection that silver "is blackened by this process but not enriched with gold."

The next sentence in the same paragraph is the editor's report of Agricola's comment on Poppius; the word "missing" marks only the typographic break before that report. No lost alchemical formula is recoverable beyond what the page already attributes to Agricola.

Reader C

Not put to this reader.

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