 Porta recycled and gradually expanded many of his ideas and instructions in different works over long periods of time, to appear frequently in enlarged or amplified versions. Thus, some topics evolved into separate treatises; at other times, Porta attempted to reformulate his ideas to suit ecclesiastical regulations. This was prominently the case with Porta’s ideas on physiognomy discussed above. In other instances, Porta sought to adapt his ideas to the emerging scholarly standards of the new science of his day. A case in point is his treatment of powers of diverse siphons to lift water or to separate different fluids (for instance water from wine) from each other. What seems to have been originally intended as a party gag in the first version of the Magia naturalis (where Porta probably plagiarized from a chapter in Girolamo Cardano’s De subtilitate), migrated to the enlarged version of the Magia, to become eventually a key topic in I tre libri spiritali. Here, amidst boasting that he could build structures that would be capable of lifting water up to the highest mountains, Porta ties his claims about the powers of siphons to a discussion on the impossibility of the vacuum. Finally he discusses similar experimental devices in the De aeris transmutations. They were eagerly copied and amplified by the Jesuit Gaspar Schott, whereas Francis Bacon significantly developed them into new directions. (Trabucco 2016, Jalobeanu 2020)