Adams lists the Rosicrucians in her Dictionary under the spelling Rose Crucians, among the early-modern esoteric fraternities; a clean transcription of her entry is still to be added here.
In Hannah Adams
In Adams’s own words, from the 1817 Dictionary. Each passage is quoted verbatim under its own entry.
ROSE CRUCIANS, certain hermetical philosophers, who, in the fourteenth century, formed a secret society, pretending to the knowledge of the philosopher’s stone, and other wonderful mysteries derived from the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Magi. Among their most celebrated professors they reckon Jacob Behmen, the mystic, Dr. Robert Fludd, an English physician, and many others of eccentric genius and learning, who blended the mysteries of alchymy, chemistry, and theology, into one system. The term Rosecrucian is of chemical derivation, from ros, dew, and cruz, the cross; because they considered dew as the chief solvent of gold, and the cross as an emblem of lux, the light, those letters being all formed out of the figure of a eross.t The Resecrucians have been sometimes confounded with * Adam’s Religious World display dress to protestants.
ft Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 226. a the free masons, who pretend also to mystic secrets.
Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, 4th ed. (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1817), entry “Rose Crucians” (p. 249).