After this, and several other conferences, which the Empress held with the Worm-men, she dismissed them; and having taken much satisfaction in several of their answers, encouraged them in their studies and observations. Then she made a convocation of her chemists, the Ape-men; and commanded them to give her an account of the several transmutations which their art was able to produce. They begun first with a long and tedious discourse concerning the primitive ingredients of natural bodies; and how, by their art, they had found out the principles out of which they consist.