Page 45 - Scottish Alchemists

sailor received him with joy, and he spent several weeks in his house. During
his sojourn there, a fraternal intimacy arose. The Scotsman did not wish to
quit his guest without confiding to him what he knew of the art of
transmuting metals, and to prove it, he made a projection in his presence.
The 13th of March 1602, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Seton changed a
piece of lead into a piece of gold of the same weight, which he left as a
souvenir to his friend James Haussen.

Struck by the prodigy which he had witnessed, Haussen did not hesitate
to talk of it to one of his friends, a medical man of Enkhuysen, and to him he
also made a present of a piece of his gold. This friend was Van der Linden,
grandfather of John Van der Linden, author of several medical works; and
who, having inherited this gold, showed it to the celebrated physician,
George Morhof, author of the well known letter above referred to, and out
of which this part of the history of ‘the Cosmopolite’ is taken.

After quittng Enkhuysen, Seton repaired to Amsterdam, and afterwards
to Rotterdam, and then embarked for Italy. Dempster, in his History of
Scottish Writers, (Vol. ii. p.603) states that he gave notable proofs of his skill
at Naples, and that in the Portico at Florence, at the Museum of the Grand
Duke, his skill was attested by two plates of gold which he made of molten
lead, but while the goldsmith in whose workshop he performed the
projection was inspecting and much admiring his work, he withdrew from
the place, and was not to be found afterwards in the city or its
neighbourhood

In the same year he seems to have arrived in Germany, through
Switzerland, in company with a professor of Friburg, Wolfgang Dienheim,
who, declared adversary as he was to the hermetical philosophy, was
constrained to render his testimony to the success of a projection which
Seton executed at Basle, before him and several important persons of that
city.

“In 1602,” writes Dr Dienheim, “about the middle of summer, when
returning by Rome to Germany, I found myself at the side of a man
singularly spiritual, small in size, but sufficiently stout, of a ruddy
complexion, of a sanguine temperament, having a brown heard cropped in
the style of France. He was dressed in a habit of black satin, and had for his
suite a single attendant, who could be distinguished among all by his red hair
and beard of the same colour. This man called himself Alexander Seton. At
Zurich, where the clergyman Tighlin gave him a letter to Dr Zwinger, we
hired a boat and returned by water to Basle. On our arrival in that town, my
companion said to me - you will remember that throughout the voyage, and
in the boat, you abused alchemy and alchemists. You will also recollect that I

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