Page 49 - Scottish Alchemists

saying he could not commit so great a sin, and counselled his rescuer to ask
it from God.

Seton died in 1604, from the effects of the tortures inflicted on him.
Sendivogius then married his widow, from whom he obtained a small
quantity of the red powder of projection, and an alchemical manuscript,
entitled ‘The Book of twelve chapters’, which he published at Cracow, with
the motto Angelus doce mihi jus. This being the anagram of his own name,
caused the book to be attributed to him.

Sendivogius successfully used small quantities of the powder he received
from Seton at various places, and obtained great notoriety. All the Courts in
Germany were impatient to have visits from him; and he was so successful
in his transmutations made at Prague before the Emperor Rudolph II, that to
commemorate the circumstance the Emperor placed a marble tablet on the
wall of the room where the experiments were performed, with the inscription

Faciat hoc quispiam
Quod fecit Sendivogius Polonus.
This tablet was often visited by the curious, and so recently as 1740 was
to be found in the imperial castle at Prague.18

18 In the notice of Seton given in Dempster's Historia Eccles. Gentis Scot.,
already quoted, it would appear that his fame as an alchemist was very great, and
that an epigram, Alter Jason eris, qualis Sidonius estque Ramsaeus, had been
praised by Raphael Eginus Icovius. Dempster states that he had met Seton at
Toulouse, where he showed him several things, but immediately repented having
done so. "This," Dempster adds, “I at all events learned from him, that he
considered liberty more precious than gold, and that he neither wished for the
attention of princes nor the friendship of the great. He lived a wandering kind of
life, and though practising a lucrative profession, he was poor. I have heard that he
was killed in France by two men, in the hope of getting at his secret, who were for
this offence afterwards executed."

44