It's quite a simple question: how would a mage, who wants to weld, say, a cube of wood to a cube of meat, formulate a spell? Where should I even begin on my journey to the answer? Would it be possible to fuse flesh with flesh to attach limbs?
Creo Animal spell - "Create Glue"
Silly, boring answer - but should actually work just fine.
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You can use Creo to create various types of sticky material (based on Animal, Aquam, Corpus, Herbam, or Terram) to glue the two together. Or use Creo Ignem to make the wood so hot that meat, in contact with it, chars and sticks. Or use Creo Mentem to make some other magician it's really important to make the two cubes stick.
You can use Muto to make any substance into a glue (thus: Animal, Auram, Aquam, Corpus, Herbam, Ignem, Terram, and even Mentem or, with Glamour, Imaginem); or directly change the wood or the meat (with Herbam, or Animal/Corpus depending on the meat). Or change a spell with Muto Vim (including a Muto Vim spell!) so that it becomes another appropriate spell.
You can use Perdo with Herbam and Animal (or Corpus, it depends on the meat) to make the cubes temporarily insubstantial, compenetrate them, and then dispel/let elapse the magic on an appropriate portion of the cubes, so that the now material portions keep them stuck together (I hope that's clear! In 1D: Material Wood, thin Immaterial Wood compenetrated with Material Meat, thin Immaterial Meat compenetrated with Immaterial Wood, Material Meat). You can also use Perdo Ignem to freeze the wood so that the meat sticks.
You can use Rego with Herbam and/or Animal to craft the two cubes so they stick together. Alternatively, you can "hold" the two cubes together with Rego Herbam, Animal/Corpus, Auram. You can wield tools of metal, wood, ice, bone etc. to do the work using with Rego Aquam, Corpus, Herbam, Terram. You can force some other magus to do so with Rego Mentem, or summon and command some supernatural spirit to do so with Rego Vim.
Honestly, I'm sort of stomped with Intellego ... except possibly Intellego Mentem to steal someone's dirty secrets and blackmail them into doing the work for you!
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Well, I'd be very surprised if the soggy meat would stick to the wooden block coated with glue. Besides, the materials wouldn't welded together, it would be a sandwich of 1st material, glue and 2nd material. It's definitely possible to fuse plants together IRL, so I'd assume magi would want to do something like this with their powers.
Oh, you can glue meat to wood all right.
I know a person who unwittingly glued his hand to a workbench with some industrial-strength glue, and had to carve off a big flake of the wood so as to get the hand to some solvent.... It sounds funny, it was not. And here we're talking about magical glue!
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Muto is the easiest and cheapest Technique for melding two materials together.
Use an effect similar to Rock of Viscid Clay or Ink of Noblest Metal, with the appropriate Form for the target. With the first you can press and smear them together, with them effectively becoming bound if you work at it when they convert back. With the second you pour them all together into a mold and when they change back they are one solid blended material.
While it is possible to do with other Techniques, it is generally less effect, higher level, and could require Vis for a permanent effect.
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That is a really cool idea, and for some reason I feel like I've read it from you somewhere… It also looks like you could liquefy mainly the surface with a steep gradient and let the diffusion do it's dirty work; a Rego requisite would be handy too.
Though, now I'm curious about other sorts of compositions: attaching limbs, combining biological species (makes me think, that Rego would do for gluing a shadow, btw), making plants and animals grow gold, embedding magical devices into people, bridging minds… Maybe, something that doesn't require melding per se, like giving a horse wings via Muto (Creo?). Are there any examples in the books? Any guidelines or prohibitions? I do remember the Limit of Essential Nature.
Otherwise, I'm pleased with your answer and I'm tempted to mark it as the solution. Thank you, Troy!
(Btw, Ezzelino, I hope, your acquaintance's hand was still very much leathery, when they were gluing the wood 
)
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Let's put it this way: I'm willing to bet 100:1 that I can glue a cube of fondue meat to a wooden tray so that if I turn the tray upside down the cube does not fall!
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You may want to check out Marcus of Criamon from Magi of Hermes, pp.79-86.
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Wow, did I miss this one? Or did you edit it just now? Anyway, I like this comprehensive list, though I'd like to ask some questions:
I wouldn't use CreCo for creating sticky stuff, mee sodalis… How knows, what might come out of it?
I'm not too sure you can temporarily Perdo something. IIRC it contradicts the rules and doesn't fit thematically to well.
I'd also like some elaborations on the crafting object together part. Indeed, I remember some guidlines about using Rego for mundane work, but I'm not convinced that joining dissimilar substances qualifies as such. Also, also; wouldn't you need two spells to hold two objects together?
Your comment has made me think about some magic devices, such as a magical gluing brush and self-attaching… err-m… somethings. Limbs, perhaps? Sticky bounds?
I'm pure of heart and I'll just answer by noting that just like you can create glue from animal components, you can do so from human components. Most of the magi in my games who specialize in Corpus and neither Animal nor Herbam tend to have most of their equipment made from human remains. I find it crass, but...
You can Perdo some aspect of something (check the PeCo guideline on ArM5 p.133, "Destroy one property of a person, such as their weight or solidity"). If the result is unnatural (as in the case of weight or solidity) nature reasserts itself when the magic ends.
There's also a specific Minor Flaw, Harmless Magic, in HoH:MC p.87 that makes all your Perdo effectively temporary.
You can use Rego Craft magic to do anything a mundane craftsman would do. In this case, you are not so much welding meat and wood, as grafting one onto the other, much as a modern surgeon would.
No. Use T:Group, or use T:Ind to keep one object attached to the other (or a third object binding the two together).
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Coincidentally grafting is the process of fusing plant matter I talked about. But… Does it still count? I've got no objections against grafting two saplings or even grafting two blobs of muscle, but grafting meat to wood in mundane circumstances seems a tad farfetched, regardless of how much I would like the implications: there is no natural process you'd guide these substances through to attach them.
Why, the enchanted object most certainly will stick to the other one, but not vice versa: if I bind a golden block to a tin block, I'd easily hold the structure by the tin block, but I'd have to keep the balance otherwise. I might well be overthinking this, since Rego spells do protect the target from other objects, though. I need to sleep on it. It's mighty late here, actually.
Btw, I don't have any ArM books, save for the 4th ed., yet, but I hope that the clouds will part and I'll be able to genuinely buy the whole available stock of the goods and Tweet and Rein (IIRC) will see my penny. So some of the quotes are new to me.
3 spells
MuAn(Te)- change meat to metal
MuHe(Te)- change wood to metal
ReTe- weld the metals together
then drop the muto spells
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More than likely you have, since I tend to cover a lot of magical crafting that is not "Craft Magic". I have described spells and effects, both to fit a situation and from my own Saga. Many of them actually have write-ups.
I believe the most recent thread was for magical industry in a fairly new covenant, specifically on creating very good glass.
Eho, @ezzelino, do you maybe have an answer: would it be possible to enhance mage's casting abilities via body modifications? I'd imagine, having two mouths or four arms would greatly improve the control over the Vis. I may go as far as to fancy the idea of multicasting (with some CreMe, perhaps, to help with the coordination).
Oh boy, I might already be thinking of magical mechs and stuff…
Obvious benefit is for CrCo ritual to permanently increase Sta
And of course CrMe spells as well, though that isn't really body modification
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I do not think that two mouths or four arms would improve spellcasting any more than it would improve ... bargaining. But ultimately, this is a very "saga dependent" choice!
On the other hand, as silveroak mentioned, one can improve one's characteristics via CrCo and CrMe Rituals; and there are ways to make one's body into a talisman and "embed" mystical materials into it so as to gain advantage of the S&M bonuses.
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Well, it seems to me, that the intensity of the movements and sounds does affect the success of the spell, though I agree with the YMMV policy. It's odd, though, that the use of external methods of magic amplification is never brought up.
Speaking of embedding magic into a living body: wouldn't it be a bit too sily? I was thinking about this specific idea in my spare time and it appears to be overpowered