text:  Could magic could Hermes Trismegistus have done more? What would you think fair reader of a problem such as this--to write a book which should be sense for your own generation nonsense for the next should revive into sense for the next after that but again became nonsense for the fourth; and so on by alternate successions sinking into night or blazing into day like the Sicilian river Arethusa and the English river Mole--or like the undulating motions of a flattened stone which children cause to skim the breast of a river now diving below the water now grazing its surface sinking heavily into darkness rising buoyantly into light through a long vista of alternations? Such a problem you say is impossible