Page 19 - Scottish Alchemists

“I haveing found by letters directed from one Dr Politius (a Polonian or
Silesian) to my grandfather Sir George Areskine of Innertile, brother to the
Earl of Kellie and grandchild to the Earle of Marr, a Senator of the Colledge
of Justice, and Privy Counsellor to King James the 6th and to King Charles
1st, who was a great student of naturall philosophy, evn to a considerable
advancement in the hermetick school, and had a correspondence in very
remote parts with the sonnes of Hermes, and of whose fruits of his
expensive and secret correspondence with them I have depositat some
volumns of manuscripts mostly of his own handwritt.

“This was sent to him by the society at Hess, and directed under the
convoy of the said Dr Politius, who by his letters to Sir George declares that
by direction of that society his chief errand to Scotland was to confer with
him. And I judged it a monument not unworthy to be consigned to the
Honorable Colledge of Phisitians at Edinburgh, both for its convoyance and
matter, evn tho perhaps much of it may be or is now in print; yett this being
long or it was, [it] is to print as ane autografon and hath more be much then
is printed, and many authors not mentioned in the print.

“To the Royal Colledge of Phisitians this vol. and severall other volumns
is affectionately and humbly offered on the nynteen of June An. Chr. 1707
by Geo. Cromertie.”

In June 1685 the Earl of Cromarty (then Viscount Tarbat) had signed, as
“Clerk to His Majesty’s Parliament, Council, Register and Rolls,” a ratifica-
tion of the privileges of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh,
granted by their charter, to which the great seal of Scotland was appended on
St. Andrew’s day, 1681.

From the interesting statement of the Earl above given, and from the
manuscripts of Sir George Erskine containing several treatises relative to the
rules of the Society of Rosicrucians, it is not improbable that the Dr Politius
above named was one of the missionaries sent from Germany to propagate
their tenets, and that Sir George had been in active correspondence with
them.

The Rosicrucians, or followers of Christian Rosencreutz or ‘Rose
Cross’, a German philosopher, who died in 1484, created about the year
1605 a great sensation in Germany. His followers believed that the
philosophers’ stone, like the quintessence, was not only a means of obtaining
wealth but also health and happiness, and that by it mankind could acquire
the most intimate knowledge of all the secrets of the universe. According to
Michael Mayer, a celebrated physician, who had wasted his fortune in
alchemical researches, their tenets were “that the meditations of their

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