Swedenborg's pre-theological career is not a footnote: he was assessor extraordinary on the Swedish Board of Mines for over thirty years, published on algebra, on the motion of the earth, on metallurgy in the Opera Philosophica et Mineralia of 1734, and in the Oeconomia Regni Animalis and the Cerebrum made anatomical proposals about the cerebral cortex and the pituitary that later physiologists took seriously. He sat in the House of Nobles as head of his family and spoke on currency and the liquor trade. The change came in a period of intense dreams recorded in his Journal of Dreams in 1743-44 and, on his account, a vision in London in April 1745 in which the Lord commissioned him. He published the theology anonymously, paid for it himself, gave it away to bishops and universities, and made no attempt to gather followers. He was tried in absentia in Sweden in 1769-70 when two clergymen who read him were charged with heresy; the case was left unresolved.