Spanish omelette trick

From John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals: Including Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper, and Tin Mines; With a Large Number of Interesting Experiments Relating to Alchemy and the Chemistry of the Fifty Metallic Elements (The Author reserves the right of translation) (London, 1861), chapter entitled The Tricks of the Alchemists:

Another simple mode of conjuring, or conveying by sleight-of-hand, gold or silver into a crucible, called at the time transmutation, was that of using a hollow rod, which, being previously filled with bits of gold or silver, and closed at one end with wax, would, of course, deliver the same into the crucible, when the heat had melted away the wax. Indeed, this is perhaps one of the oldest tricks, and finds its parallel in the pious fraud of the good Spanish monk, who produced an omelette in a frying-pan out of his staff for one of his hungry flock, having previously conveyed therein the materials usually employed in the preparation of that culinary delicacy.

The illustration is brilliant:

So how did transubstantiation work?

Trevor @ 25 May 2006 5:33 PM

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