Despite royal prohibition, transmutation efforts continued underground long after the widely accepted dates for their demise.

Rumor had it that these machines were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. Scholars showed otherwise.

Lodestones are dull, lumpy, and slate-gray, but their “magnetic intelligence” made them fabulously expensive.

And other wonders of spontaneous generation.

The Book of Stones, a central alchemical text, contained formulae with the power to create living tissue from ordinary matter, supposedly.