Editorial note — INDEX

This book may be best consulted in the French translation, said to be by the Baron D’Holbach (Paris, 1752). Here we have in its final form the little book of Neri, which has passed through the translator’s crucible as many as four times—from Italian to English, then to Latin, to German, and finally to French. For there was, too, an Amsterdam edition in Latin (1668) which came between the English and Kunckel’s version. But, unlike the gold of the alchemist, the work really increased in value during these transformations. Several curious treatises, in the manner of the time, half alchemistic, half scientific, are to be found at the end of the French translation, including a rendering into French of Orschall’s Sol sine Veste.