Manuscript copy of parts of the chapter on calcination (known as the first Gate) from Ripley's Compound of alchymy, comprising 39 lines of English verse, with a one line Latin heading and conclusion. This manuscript leaf is from an early commonplace book of mainly legal texts. The text does not conform to Elias Ashmole's published 17th-century version of Ripley's work. The text begins with 15 lines from Ripley's Epistle, and after two lines of Ripley's chapter, introduces a further two lines from an unidentified source, beginning "The white must come first." After another ten lines from Ripley's first Gate, the writer includes a line from the second Gate (line 43). The remaining nine lines are from an unidentified source. The complex garbling of the text suggests that it may have been written out by a practicing alchemist using Ripley's earlier text to make particular points in an unusual way. The concluding line in Latin suggests that this text may also be linked with Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton, whose famous trip to mainland Europe in 1601/2 won him fame as the cosmopolite, performing a series of verified transmutations of base metal into gold.

1 pages.