Anthologies of alchemical treatises by divers hands were popular and influential in England and on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and ranged in size from Lazarus Zetzner's voluminous Theatrum Chemicum, first published in Ursel in 1602 and frequently reissued in expanded editions, to the Collectanea Chymica, which the London printer William Cooper produced in 1684. It included ten essays by both long established alchemical authorities, Roger Bacon, George Ripley, and Bernard of Trevisan, author of this work, and more recent writers, such as John Baptist van Helmont and Francis Antonie, whose recipe for aurum potabile appears later in this collection. Bernard of Trevisan (the Earl of Trevisa in Italy, or Trevisanus) probably flourished during the last half of the fourteenth century, although he has also been placed in the fifteenth. An autobiographical passage in one of his works, De Chemico Miraculo, presents Trevisan as one whose life was passionately devoted to searching for the secret of transmutation – which proved unsuccessful until his final years. He is perhaps best known for his alchemical correspondence with Thomas of Bologna, father of the poet, Christine de Pisan (ca. 1363-ca. 1431). Trevisan's Treatise of the Philosopher's Stone presents an unusually clear and succinct summary of the process.

The following text is complete and taken from the Collectanea Chymica: A Collection of Ten Several Treatises in Chymistry (London: Printed for William Cooper, at the Pelican in Little Britain, 1684).