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The miracles of Christ were not so great as those which I can perform wherever and as often as I will. Of all alchemists I am the first, and my powers are such that I can obtain all things that man desires. My shoe-buckles contain more learning than the heads of Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high schools. I am monarch of all learning.

If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old alchemists, he may as well let it alone. He must talk in very plain words, and that is what I have done. You want to know what a certain number of scores of years have taught me that I think best worth telling.

In the best of congregations there can be but few alchemists; and, without that science, who is to extract the essence of Truth from the moles incongesta of crass moralities? To persuade or dissuade you must interest the head or the heart.

For twelve months this fiction had been emerging from the sea of my thoughts; often did it wholly fill me; sometimes I fancied with the alchemists that I had dug up the treasure; then again it sank suddenly, and I despaired of ever being able to bring it to the light. I felt what a mass of knowledge of various kinds I must first acquire.

Mary Virginia often talked as the alchemists used to write cryptically, abstrusely, as if to hide the golden truth from all but the initiate. "Come and shake hands with Mr. Flint, Kerry," said she to the setter. "I want you to help make him understand things it's high time he should know. Nobody can do that better than a good dog can."

The belief of the alchemists that all natural events are connected by a hidden thread, that everything has an influence on other things, that "what is above is as what is below," constrained them to place stress on the supposed connexion between the planets and the metals, and to further their metallic transformations by performing them at times when certain planets were in conjunction.

If Mr Dorrit had wanted supper, there was an Italian cook and there was a Swiss confectioner, who must have put on caps as high as the Pope's Mitre, and have performed the mysteries of Alchemists in a copper-saucepaned laboratory below, before he could have got it. He was sententious and didactic that night.

It has invented others which form the basis of long series of well-known composite substances. In fact, we are perhaps becoming overburdened with our list of proximate principles, demonstrated and hypothetical. How much nearer have we come to the secret of force than Lully and Geber and the whole crew of juggling alchemists?

When I was getting together the material for my little book on the old alchemists I read a great deal at the library of the Arsenal, which, you may have heard, is singularly rich in all works dealing with the occult sciences. Burden's face assumed an expression of amused disdain. He could not understand why Dr Porhoët occupied his leisure with studies so profitless.

So far as I can judge from their writings, the argument of the alchemists may be rendered by some such form as the foregoing. That the alchemists were satisfied of the great simplicity of nature, and their own knowledge of the ways of nature's work, is apparent from their writings.