commonly called Sendivogius the Pole, the latter of whom 

 made a great stir at the court of Rudolph. 



Seton, \vhose antecedents are not known, appears to have 

 had no other object in life than to travel through Europe 

 and to make converts to alchemy by his astonishing skill in 

 legerdemain, or perhaps by superior knowledge of chemistry ; 

 not needing money himself he was generous to those who 

 befriended him or who secured his good will, often giving 

 them golden souvenirs of his visits.^ Seton first appears as 

 a resident of Seton Hall on the coast of Scotland, where he 

 treated with kindness a poor shipwrecked mariner, named 

 Haussen, from the Netherlands. He then pays a mysterious 

 visit to Haussen at the latter's modest dwelling near Amster- 

 dam, where the sailor received him with joy and entertained 

 him for several weeks; on his departure Seton showed his 

 host the secret of transmutation, converting in his presence 

 a piece of lead into gold of the same weight, and giving it 

 to him as a testimony of the verity of alchemy ; this trans- 

 action occured on the 13th March 1602. 



The following summer Seton converted two opponents 

 of alchemy into adherents by a clever performance at Basel, 

 Switzerland, viz.: Dr. Wolfgang Dienheim, Professor at the 

 University of Fribourg, and Dr. Jacob Zwinger. The three 

 went to the laboratory of a worker in gold, taking with 

 them some sheets of lead, a crucible, and some sulfur bought 

 by the way; Seton handled nothing, but built a fire in the 

 furnace, melted the lead and sulfur together in the crucible and 

 stirred the mixture with iron rods. In a short time Seton 

 asked the doctors to throw into the molten metal a heavy 

 yellow powder contained in a piece of paper. Dienheim de- 

 scribing the affair said: "Though as unbelieving as Saint 

 Thomas we did as directed," and after fifteen minutes the 

 crucible was removed from the fire; on cooling the lead had 



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