his employ, and sent him a letter beseeching him to reveal 

 the secret process ; for reply Beuther wrote on the walls of 

 his prison cell: "Caged rats catch no mice.' ? When this was 

 reported to the Prince he gave Beuther his liberty, but set 

 him at work in the laboratory under a watchful guard ; seeing 

 no hope of pleasing the Elector the unhappy alchemist com- 

 mitted suicide in his laboratory during the momentary ab- 

 sence of the guard. 



The \vife of Augustus, Anna of Denmark, affectionately 

 called "Mother Anna" by the common people on account of 

 her piety and benevolence, was also a zealous seeker after 

 the Philosophers' stone and constructed on her own estate, 

 Annaberg, two splendidly equipped laboratories in which 

 great and small furnaces were continually glowing; one was 

 devoted to the manufacture of substances used in medicine 

 and the other to experiments in alchemy. In the first Paul 

 Luther, the son of the founder of Protestantism, is said to 

 have worked, in the latter labored David Beuther and Sebald 

 Schwertzer, of whom more will be learned presently. 



From this neighboring state of Saxony, as well as from 

 Denmark, Italy and the Orient came frequent reports of suc- 

 cessful transmutations which became staple topics of dis- 

 cussion at the conferences in Gold Alley, in the court assemblies 

 and in the private apartments of the Emperor. The courtier 

 Martin Rutzke, the poet de Delle, and the physician von Hayek 

 retailed to Rudolph the current gossip of the day, and never 

 obtained a more interested auditor than when they reported 

 the latest success in the hermetic art; thus the Emperor lived 

 in an alchemical atmosphere inhaling with every breath new 

 intoxicants. He rewarded too his faithful gossips more gener- 

 ously than that other great patron of science and art, Pope 

 Leo X, of whom the following anecdote is related: Having 

 been presented by Aurelius Augurelli with an epic poem in 



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