The Sun Between Two Vessels

The story

In the left margin of a closely written French recipe, the scribe has stacked three small pictures: a pot on a yellow stand, then a little sun with wavy rays, then a shallow dish. Read top to bottom, they say that the vessel goes out into the sun and what drips down is caught below. The text beside it gives the times in days. This is the Wellcome's Ymage de Vie, a fifteenth-century French book of processes attributed to Raymond Lull, whose writings, the library's own catalogue card says, have been credited to a Franciscan friar or a Spanish Jew of the fourteenth century. The scribe needed three tiny drawings, and they still explain the method faster than the paragraph does.