Bacon, Roger, pseudo

He cites authorities profusely, and this is of importance from the fact that Petrus Bonus seems to have been a writer whose personality and date are generally accepted as genuine. The work bears all the character of an earnest and honest treatise. Authors whom he cites, he cites very frequently. Thus the works of (pseudo-) Geber,written probably about 1300, are very often quoted, and apparently this is the latest authority he knows. There is no citation in his lengthy work, which is confined strictly to alchemy, of any treatise on this subject by Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Arnaldus of Villanova nor Raymond Lullus. It is impossible that he should have cited Lullus in 1330, because, as we have seen, this pseudo-Lullus literature is certainly none of it earlier, and probably all of it considerably later. 

Cf. J. Needham (n. 28), vol. V (4), p. 502 Yet the elixir conception, from Tsou Yen through Jabir to Roger Bacon, was a veritably great creative dream . Needham does not include any of the pseudo-Lullian writings in his survey of the Western elixir tradition. 

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