Frontispiece of the German edition of 1723

NATURE UNVEILED

Gold

THEORY OF NATURE

Homer's Golden Chain ( Aurea Catena Homeri )
and Plato's Ring ( Annulus Platonis )

Anton Josef Kirchweger


1772 version in the French language, translation by Pierre de Fournelle
Based on the original Leipsic edition of 1723, in German language

Aurea catena Homeri oder eine Beschreibung von dem
Ursprung der Natur und natürlichen Dingen
Franckfurt und Leipzig, 1723

SECOND VOLUME

FOREWORD

As in the first part I treated, in a general and universal way, of the generation of all things, I will treat in the same way in this second part, only in a general and universal way of their destruction: each one will be able to draw particular speculations from it. I put forward nothing that is not supported by experience, and I do not give any procedure that I have not practiced with my own hands. If anyone is enlightened and achieves the desired goal, let him give thanks to God, author and dispenser of all good, and not to me; that he applies himself with this to practicing throughout his life the principal commandment of God, charity towards his neighbour, without distinction of friend or foe. As I do not attribute what I know, neither to my merit nor to my work,but only to divine goodness; I communicate it as a talent that she confided to me, to those who place their hope in her, and who join to uprightness of heart love of work and firmness. If they don't cut to the chase, they have to excuse me, since I can't work with them; that they do not however despair of success; no fruit ripens before its time, and just as a child cannot act like a grown man, an apprentice in Alchymy cannot work like a Philosopher. It will always be true to say since I cannot work with them; that they do not however despair of success; no fruit ripens before its time, and just as a child cannot act like a grown man, an apprentice in Alchymy cannot work like a Philosopher. It will always be true to saysince I cannot work with them; that they do not however despair of success; no fruit ripens before its time, and just as a child cannot act like a grown man, an apprentice in Alchymy cannot work like a Philosopher. It will always be true to sayerrando discimus et imperfecti per tempus perfecti efficimur.


NATURE UNVEILED

GOLD

THEORY OF NATURE


SECOND PART

Of the destruction and analysis of natural things.



TREE OF UNIVERSAL ANALYSIS

UNIVERSALITY
The volatile, with its phlegm and its subtle oil
Acid, with its phlegm and fatty oil
Alkali, coals, ashes and salt

ANIMALITY
The volatile, with its phlegm and its subtle oil
Acid, with its phlegm and fatty oil
Alkali, coals, ashes and salt

VEGETABILITY
The volatile, with its phlegm and its subtle oil
Acid, with its phlegm and fatty oil
Alkali, coals, ashes and salt

MINERALITY
The acid spirit, with its phlegm
Acid and corrosive oil
The alkali, the remaining earth and its salt


CHAPTER I

In what way Nature destroys natural things, reduces them to their first matter, namely nitre and salt, and makes them again become vapours.

We have proved above that Nature procreates all things from primordial water and from regenerated chaos, that is, from rain, dew and snow-water; either we consider them in their state of volatility, as they fall from the air to the earth, or we see them already somewhat fixed and corporeal, in the form of saltpetre or salt. We are going to show that this same chaotic water destroys, separates, resolves and corrupts all things, both volatile and fixed, and reduces them to their first matter, that is, to saltpetre and salt, these to water and the water to vapours. Nature, after having formed them from the said principles, ascending step by step to the perfection to which they are destined, retraces her steps, and brings them equally by degrees back to their first origin.

We have demonstrated in the first part, in the chapter on the earth and its exhalations, and in various other places, principally in the birth of minerals, what method Nature uses to resolve these fixed sperms, that is to say, saltpeter and salt into water, and then this water into vapours. Thus it will not be necessary to repeat here how they soar through the center of the earth in the form of vapors into the air, etc.

After having laid down these general principles, we will begin with the animal sphere, and we will tell in what manner animals fall into corruption and retrograde in their first matter.

CHAPTER II

How Nature destroys animals.

Animals rot, change into moths and worms, these become flies, and these are resolved in their term, in first universal matter, that is to say in saline, nitrous and chaotic nature, then in water and vapors, from which come dew and rain, and from these are regenerated again the highly volatile nitre and salt.

The animals are of a very moist, succulent nature, and full of a volatile salt; for this reason, as soon as their vivifying and balsamic spirit is dissipated, they begin to putrefy, to swell, to exhale volatile parts which infect the air with a very stinking odor, and everything becomes slimy and damp. To shorten and not to dwell on disgusting images, I will not say more about this reign. In dealing with the dissolution of plants, I will explain more fully the effects of putrefaction which are the same there, more or less. If anyone wants to study them more particularly in animals, he has only to go to a place where there is carrion, to contemplate there, if he has the courage, the changes that take place there from one day to the next;he will see the worms walking there in quantity. Let him take some of these well-fattened worms; let him enclose them in a glass bottle; let him feed them some stinking meat; let him cover the bottle with a paper in which there are holes, and let him put it in a little heat from the sun: he will see there in a few days, and even in a few hours, how these worms metamorphose and become flies, or gnats of different species.

This comes mainly from volatile animal parts; but the more fixed parts, and which are not so volatile, are changed into water and earth, from which by leaching we can extract saltpetre and salt. These remaining parts, that is to say the saltpeter and the salt, are found in every subject in its last reduction: the volatile flies away and is exhaled in the form of vapor to be chaotic in the air; the more fixed parts slip into the water and into the earth to be reduced there to the first more fixed sperm, that is to say, into saltpeter and salt; from these principles plants are born. In this way the animal kingdom becomes vegetable, as we taught in the first part.

But as in animals the bones are more coagulated and more compact, Nature also needs more time to reduce them to dust and earth, as we observe in wooden plants.

CHAPTER III

How Nature destroys plants.

Vegetables can be examined with less disgust than animals; for after they are withered, they are moistened by the rain and by the dew, which anneal the acid which is there and render it volatile; it is warmed and warmed partly by the spirit which is implanted in it, partly by the heat of the sun and by the central heat which are joined to it. The latter rises continuously from below, as that of the sun darts from above. This heat of the earth is even noticeable in winter, in the cellars. This awakened acid, penetrates and traverses the pores of the plants, heats and excites the volatile, to make it exhale in the air in order to be chaotized there;it also softens the fixed and harder parts, reduces them to juice and mucus, which slip into the earth and mingle with it to be changed there into a more fixed and chaotic sperm,

Moths and worms are also born from the volatile parts of plants; from these come flies and gnats, when they have not been too much dried up by the heat; which makes it known that the vegetable kingdom can become animal or volatile, as can be seen in the green plants and trees, from which the superfluous juices flowing from it begin to rot, and then produce entire nests of flies and all sorts of other volatile insects. This is how the destruction of the weakest plants takes place.

With stronger plants, like trees, Nature has much more to contend with before she can reduce them to their raw matter and chaotic water. Here's how she does it. When the tree is dead, that is to say when its vegetative spirit has ceased to act, the root loses its attractive virtue and no longer gives nourishment to the trunk; which causes the leaves to fall and the tree to dry out. Then it fills internally, through the pores, with vapors which begin gradually to soften its parts, to ferment and putrefy by the action of the implanted spirit; for as soon as this spirit, specified in an individual, has been prevented by some obstacle from acting for its preservation, it resumes its universality and no longer acts except for its destruction.Thus the tree is attacked in all its parts, and it becomes, from pith to bark, spongy, tender and worm-eaten. Sun, rain and frost attack it alike. The sun heats it further and further, and sometimes makes it crack, because its conservative humidity has abandoned it. The rain that falls moistens it, and as the tree is heated and dried up by the sun, it eagerly attracts moisture to itself, whereby it withers more and more; for the moisture rots there, and in rotting, it also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely.That's what heat and humidity do. Sun, rain and frost attack it alike. The sun heats it further and further, and sometimes makes it crack, because its conservative humidity has abandoned it. The rain that falls moistens it, and as the tree is heated and dried up by the sun, it eagerly attracts moisture to itself, whereby it withers more and more; for the moisture rots there, and in rotting, it also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do. Sun, rain and frost attack it alike.The sun heats it further and further, and sometimes makes it crack, because its conservative humidity has abandoned it. The rain that falls moistens it, and as the tree is heated and dried up by the sun, it eagerly attracts moisture to itself, whereby it withers more and more; for the moisture rots there, and in rotting, it also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do. because his conservative wet abandoned him.The rain that falls moistens it, and as the tree is heated and dried up by the sun, it eagerly attracts moisture to itself, whereby it withers more and more; for the moisture rots there, and in rotting, it also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do. because his conservative wet abandoned him. The rain that falls moistens it, and as the tree is heated and dried up by the sun, it eagerly attracts moisture to itself, whereby it withers more and more;for the moisture rots there, and in rotting, it also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do. also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust. After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do. also rots the tree with it, and grinds it to dust.After that, the sun, which shines its rays there again, heats it further and further, and opens its pores more and more until rot can penetrate it from one end to the other and dissolve it entirely. That's what heat and humidity do.

The jelly attacks it even more keenly; for the natural heat being driven out of the tree, when the heat of the sun returns, and warms it, the cold, which had penetrated into its pores, melts there into water. This water remains in the heart and in the marrow of the tree, and begins to rot there, swells it inside as well as outside, softens it and putrefies it. Nature continues this operation until the tree is rotten in all its parts, and it crumbles to dust. This is what the calcination of vegetables consists of. The same thing can be seen in the bones of the animal kingdom.

This calcination or dissolution is very slow; it very often lasts the life of three men and even more, when it is a very hard wood; because it is detached only from small patches of the tree successively, and from time to time: but we see a more prompt example of it in the willows and in the elms, because of their excessive humidity. When the tree is thus calcined and reduced to dust, it rots more quickly and retrogrades in a short time in its first matter, that is to say in saltpetre and in salt, as one can see it in the gardens where one employs, to smoke them, this dust which there rots and changes very quickly in its first matter. The calcination of the wood is much more rapid, when it is reduced to small parts,how easy it is to conceive of it and to ascertain it by experience; for if one takes sawdust from a tree, waters it with putrefied rainwater, and exposes it to lukewarm air, it quickly heats up, burps, becomes stinky, mucous, and finally resolves into thick water. If there are no obstacles, this water fills with worms and moths, which then change into flies or gnats. When these are gone, only a little earth moisture remains, as I have experienced with some plants and some woods; but if we prevent these worms and flies from flying away, we can fertilize the soil of the gardens with these rotten vegetables, or separate the principles from them by chemistry, by distilling them. This is what natural separation consists of,

But you may ask me why I use rotten rainwater for this purpose and what it may contain to help putrefaction, or what is the principle in rainwater that causes rot. I use putrefied rainwater, because it is the homogeneous leaven of all things.

Several chemists, and not without reason, also mix leaven or the lees of beer or wine; but here I only use rainwater, because I only want to demonstrate that all things take their birth from chaotic water, and that they destroy each other reciprocally by it.

As for the putrefying principle, the reader himself can well imagine what it is; since the alkali is balsamic, therefore the volatile and the acid are destructive. Now, it is evident that rainwater is more volatile than fixed, and that it also contains more acid than alkali.

As the succulent parts of animals rot very quickly, and the dry and hard parts more slowly; in the same way the parts full of vegetable juices rot more quickly than those which are hard. The minerals still rot more slowly, being of a very thick, very hard, and very dry nature; and the reason why succulent and moist substances rot, after the dissipation of the balsamic vital spirits, more quickly than hard and dry substances, is that the Creator willed that water and moisture should be the instrument by means of which the all-working spirit could achieve the putrefaction which, as we demonstrated in the first part, is the main key to opening and closing all that is in Nature.

CHAPTER IV

How Nature destroys, corrupts and alters minerals.

Everything that comes from heaven and earth is made of water and spirit. This water contains two things, namely saltpetre and salt. These last two procreate in their suitable wombs all that exist in this great world, animals, plants and minerals. If in the air these salts are in the form of spirit, men draw them in by their breath and change them into their own substances and seed; and so they become of the animal kind. If they fall on the surface of the earth in the form of dew and rain, they come from plants. If they penetrate through the cracks, crevices and pores of the earth, by means of water, even into its depths, mines are born.All the difference of their operations consists, as we have already said several times, only in their different degrees of volatility and fixity. The more volatile they are, the more animals they are. If they hold the middle between the fixed and the volatile, they are plants. The more they become fixed, the more they are minerals: by which we see that the passage from one kingdom to another must be made by insensible shades.

As everything is made by these two salts, everything is also destroyed by them. One is fire and air, the other is water and earth; one is the sun, the other is the moon; one is the central internal heat, the other is the central internal water. Nitre is hot and fiery; for he is a pure and concentrated ray of the sun and of his own essence, his production and his child, or a coagulated sun; because it is fiery in all its parts, when it is set in motion, although it appears as cold and watery as ice: salt, on the contrary, is cold and watery;he is the real matter of attraction, a production and the child of the moon, who for generation strongly desires the male, that is, the saltpeter, without which he does not feel strong enough to procreate a perfect body, because of his cold, fixed and watery earthly quality.

Having established this as a foundation, we will examine with what instruments Nature destroys stones and minerals. She has in her hands, as we said above, a fire. Either she draws it from the sun, or she draws it from the central heat; this fire warms up, and then heats the rocks, the stones, in all their parts so strongly that sometimes they become almost red.

That one touches only with the hands, in the scorching days, a stone or an iron exposed to the rays of the sun; I think they will be removed soon. This great heat is followed by water or cold which moistens the heated stones; and from the combat of these two opposites, there results a violent effort which shatters the stone, and detaches bits of it. The repeated attacks of fire and water thus reduce little by little and over time the whole stone into small pieces with all the more ease because as they act on it, its pores dilate and give them freer access. These parcels equally exposed to the action of heat and humidity, break and divide more and more; and in the end they are reduced to sand and dust. This dust, which was before stone or earth,still continuing to be heated and moist, begins to rot and become of a saline or nitrous nature by the action of the spirit implanted therein; for this salty, coagulating spirit is aroused and excited by moisture to react upon its own subject. Then the stone advances towards its destruction, like the animal and the vegetable towards its death; then join to it the salt of the earth and the volatile double sperm of the rain and the dew. When the stone has come to the point of being reduced to dust, and has become saline, it is already of another nature, and capable of becoming vegetable. In this state, plants and trees grow which still rot, and from which worms and moths are born.From these come flies, gnats and cochineals, or animals use these plants for their food. In this way the stone is transmuted for the second time; namely in vegetable, and from there in animal. This animal rots and resolves itself into a chaotic, universal, saline, nitrous, aqueous, vaporous hyleal nature, and this is how the stone becomes chaotic raw material.

You see then how Nature retrogrades, and how she manages, without other instruments than fire and water, to destroy the hardest and most compact bodies. She does it very slowly; but if it could have on hand so great a quantity of salt as we procure by Art, it would operate as quickly as we do, and it would soon reduce the highest mountains to very small hills.

If in our Art we make a stone red in the fire and quench it in salt water, it will break into pieces; and it would be a stone as big as a house, if it were possible to make it redden and quench it in the said water, it would also break there. The more we repeat this operation, the more the stone will be reduced to small parts, and in the end it will change completely into mucus and water. If instead of dissolving salts in water, we distill them in spirit, and if we resolve the stones, they will be reduced to water all at once. This water can also be very quickly reduced to vapours, and these again to water by distillation. The reader will see how much the operation of Art is more prompt than that of Nature;for while the latter employs several years to calcine the stone and reduce it to the first matter, that is to say, to a nitrous and saline water, Art does it in a few hours.

Nature proceeds with mineral and metallic subjects as with stones. She heats them up and makes them burst with the water, in which is hidden a saline sperm, either in small or in large quantity. It is this which detaches the mineral or the metal, like its progeny, and little by little reduces them altogether to rust and crocuses; solves the latter, by the length of time in saline nature, and finally in water. Thus Nature brings minerals back to their first origin, and she destroys them much more quickly than stones, provided she is able to operate, because they have a manifest salt which she only needs to awaken with water and its salt to act on the contrary;but I speak here only of the minerals and metals which are still enclosed in the places of their birth or in their matrices,

As regards metals worked and refined by fire, I admit that it would take Nature a much longer time to destroy them; because the superfluous moisture has been separated from it by the violence of the fire, more so in the one than in the other. Wherefore, as the sun and the moon are almost totally deprived of their moisture, even of their sulphur, of their arsenic, of their marcasite, and partly of them are concentrated therein; Nature can only with great difficulty reduce them to their first matter. On the contrary, it finds it very easy to destroy Mars and Venus, because they still contain superfluous moisture within them, and they are quite open; so that moist air and water can easily reduce Mars to rust, and Venus to green, like Saturn and Jupiter to ceruse.Experience has taught that the sun and moon, buried in the earth, can be awakened there, when the saline dampness of the earth excites their acid spirit to action; for they have found, instead of the sun and the moon, their electras, or only dust. If we put gold or silver in places which exhale a lot of arsenical or marcassitic vapors, Nature will soon come to the end of destroying them, as we see by the Art which must necessarily follow Nature in its degrees. When sulphur, arsenic and marcasite are melted together; then add gold reddened in the fire; the gold there is reduced to dust. It is then easy to dissolve them by salts or by saline vapors and spirits, and to reduce them to their first matter. It is the same with all things:they retain their being until they encounter what is capable of destroying them; and this cannot fail to happen sooner or later; for Nature is never idle: she ceaselessly destroys, or rather she ceaselessly creates, because the corruption of one being is the generation of another; so that the destructions it effects are less destructions than transmutations, just as we see that plants and animals, which serve as our food, are changed into our substance, which must one day be transmuted into plants, and then by this means into other animals. because the corruption of one being is the generation of another;so that the destructions it effects are less destructions than transmutations, just as we see that plants and animals, which serve as our food, are changed into our substance, which must one day be transmuted into plants, and then by this means into other animals. because the corruption of one being is the generation of another; so that the destructions it effects are less destructions than transmutations, just as we see that plants and animals, which serve as our food, are changed into our substance, which must one day be transmuted into plants, and then by this means into other animals.

Art also has its transmutations. For the Philosophers, by their tincture, transmute imperfect metals into gold and silver; but it should not be thought that this tincture is a medicine which cures the whole metal, such as it grows in the mine: it only cures the purest mercurial parts, which, by a long and strong fire, have been separated from all their dross.

No scholar is unaware that the Philosophers do not take the mineral, such as it is extracted from the mines, to throw their tincture into it; but which they first separate from the mineral, by means of fire, the superfluous corrosive, sulphur, arsenic and marcasite: then they take the malleable metal which has been separated from so many parts, for in the great smelting furnace the superfluous humidity, sulphur, arsenic and volatile marcasite fly up in smoke in the air, and return into universal chaos. What remains of the more fixed part of the marcasite with the stony matrix of the mine, or the stones, is changed, partly into slag, and partly into regulus. They refine this regulus again, and again separate the most fixed parts which they call slag, until they have the very pure metallic grain.It is this grain which the Philosophers take, and which they transmute, by their tincture, into a more perfect thing, that is to say into gold or silver. We may, with much justice, call this transmutation a cure for the metallic disease; for Saturn is melancholy; Jupiter is crippled; Mars is bilious and bitter; Venus has liver heat, Mercury epilepsy; the moon dropsy. All these diseases are cured by their medicine; and thus they are brought back to the temperate nature of the sun. Mercury epilepsy; the moon dropsy. All these diseases are cured by their medicine; and thus they are brought back to the temperate nature of the sun. Mercury epilepsy;the moon dropsy. All these diseases are cured by their medicine; and thus they are brought back to the temperate nature of the sun.

I think of metallic grain as the marrow in the bones. If a man is melancholy, the marrow of his bones is also infected. If it is bilious, so is the marrow. The doctor applies the remedies to the marrow, and not to the bones and flesh. If it can heal the marrow, it is certain that it will also heal the diseases of the body; since the marrow is what is furthest away in the body: and a medicine must be very penetrating to be able to pass into the marrow; for most remedies, especially those derived from plants, remain in the third or fourth digestion; their force is dissipated in the veins, and they are evacuated by the emunctories, so that they do not penetrate into the marrow.

Although all men derive their origin from the same seed, yet they have different complexions which make them subject to different diseases. It is the same with the metals: although they are all born of the universal acid, they take on different accidental qualities in their different matrices, and contract different vices; therefore they all need a temperate medicine to acquire a solar temperament, and to be exalted by the Art to a more perfect nature. This is what the Philosophers do by their tincture.

There are also marrows of different species in the bones. The best is in the pipe, and the other, which is less perfect, in the ends of the pipe, towards the joints, or towards the cancellous bone. This one is however on the way to arrive at the perfection of the best marrow; for this spongy bone is covered with a cartilage, and this cartilage is accompanied by mucilaginous glands, in which the synovia is cooked and prepared, which, in certain respects, may be regarded as a first material of the cartilages and of the marrow. Now, the doctor does not seek to heal the synovia or the hard cartilage, or the spongy bone and its marrow, but the best marrow;because he knows that, if the medicine penetrates to the best marrow, it will also heal the weaker parts, as much as the nature of these parts requires. However, it does not change them into marrow; it only corrects their bad quality and gives them a better one.

The same thing happens with metals and minerals. We do not seek to cure, by medicine or tincture, sulphur, arsenic or marcasite, but the metal; and although it were thrown on sulphur, arsenic or marcasite, it would not change them into sun or moon; it would only change them into a solar or lunar nature. But as the imperfect marrow, cured of its disease, then becomes, by digestion and maturation, a marrow of the best quality: in the same way the sulphur, the arsenic and the marcasite of the metals being made solar and lunar, by the medicine of the Philosophers, can be reduced to gold or silver by digestion and maturation; but not like the metal which changes into gold or silver in cast iron.

We shall now descend from corruption or putrefaction to the conjunction and regeneration of the chaotic universal water, and then to that of all natural things.

CHAPTER V

From the analysis or separation, conjunction and regeneration of chaotic water, and quintessence.

In the first part we explained the beginning and the origin of Nature: how all things originated from universal vapor, or chaotic water; how this water was divided into four universal principles, or into four elements, and how, by the command of the Creator, these four elements continually regenerate this divided chaos and make it a universal seed, for the generation of animals, vegetables and minerals, etc.

Now we will deal generally with their analysis, and we will begin, following the order, with the universal chaotic water, or rainwater, which will serve as an example and model for other things. We will examine, by the Art of Vulcan, what it is able to operate as much as possible (because it would be impossible to go into it completely). We will break it down and divide it into its volatile, average and fixed parts. We will then reunite these separate parts; we will coagulate and fix them, so that everyone can see how the most volatile can acquire the fixity of a stone, and the fixed become volatile; heaven, earth, and heaven earth;the volatile will change into acid and alkali, and on the contrary: from which will result a concentrated harmony, a quintessence or a universal magisterium. It is on this model that all the others will be forced to conform; both animals and plants and minerals, as being children of the same mother.

Analysis of regenerated chaos, or rainwater

Take water from rain or snow, whichever you like, which is the seed or sperm of the universe, and nothing but water and spirit. Take, I say, some rainwater that comes from the West in the month of March: filter it after you have collected it in a new wooden barrel, or in various vases: put it in a place where it is neither too hot nor too cold, but which is noticeably lukewarm: cover it with a lid so that no filth falls into it, and let it stand a month until it smells bad: then it is ripe for separation. .

First separation from chaos

Stir all this water well with a stick: put it in a copper alembic: cover it with its capital: present a receptacle to it: distill very slowly one subtle after another, up to half; you will have the sky and the air with their subtleties separated from their receptacle or shell: it is that which is the volatile: the acid and the alkali, or the water and the earth remain in the residues.

Second parting

Then take what remains in the copper alembic; distil it again in another vessel, until a thickness of honey: what has passed is the element of water, or abundant phlegm, which rises before the acid and the alkali, and first after the volatile.

Third separation

Remove from the alembic the residues of a honeyed thickness: put them in a retorte, on the fire of sand, which you will increase by degrees: there will rise first a phlegm, and then a sour spirit like vinegar, which is the acid: this is followed by a thick oil and which belongs to the acid: because the acid is an extended oil, and the oil is a concentrated acid. These parts can be named essential waters, elementary waters and volatile parts of the earth all at the same time; because water and earth are never one without the other, or rather they are the same matter and are only different because of their volatility, their fixity or their more liquid and drier consistency.For the same reason these parts may also be called the sky and the fixed air, as I have sufficiently explained in the first part. I refer the Reader to it; let him apply it in this second part.

After all the liquid parts have been distilled by degrees, there will remain in the retort a blackish caput mortuum, a real coal, which burns like all other coals, and which is a macrocosmic virgin earth or an alkali.

You now have the chaos separated into four parts: in sky, air, water and earth; either in volatile, acid and alkali, or in very volatile water; into coarse water, and into sour spirit, or vinegar, into thick fetid oil, and into charcoal, in which the alkali salt remains concealed.

Keep and maintain each such part separately as a separate item. Everyone can see from this what the seed of the universe is, into what principles it can be separated, and what is the origin of all natural things.

As the one and simple chaos can be divided and separated into four parts, so each of its four parts can be divided into several parts or degrees: by rectification, as we will say in the sequel.

First rectification of parts of the sky

Take the product of your first distillation or of the first separation of chaos: put it in a long-necked matrass, without cutting it: adapt a suitable capital to it with its container: and distill in a bain-marie, by the first and second degrees, up to the third. You will see clear, transparent and volatile water passing by, which is the sky mixed with the most subtle air. What remains in the matrass is the coarser water. Keep these two things separate, and the first rectification is complete.

Second fix

Take the sky and rectify it for the second time, in a bain-marie, as before: distill half of it; the water will become more subtle than it was. In this way you will have made the sky more subtle and more volatile.

Third fix

Take again the subtilized sky, and distil it again until halfway: the sky will have become very subtle, and will have acquired a great diamond luster.

As for the remaining half, pass it over again. In this way you will have the sky separated into three parts: the subtle sky, the more subtle sky, and the very subtle sky. Set each one apart with its label or name.

Air rectification

Take now the coarsest air, which in the rectification of the sky has remained behind: add it to the distilled element of water, which has passed into the second separation of chaos: put these two together in a matrass, in a water bath; and distilled by four degrees; the air will pass: but the coarse water will not rise easily on the heat of the bain-marie, especially in a long-necked matrass, but well on the ash fire and in a low-necked matrass. By this operation you will seem separated from the water; but it must be rectified three times, as you did the sky, always distilling only half of it in a bain-marie; by this means you will look subtle, look more subtle, and look very subtle. You will also put labels on them and put them in good order.

water grinding

Then take the water that has remained from the air: put it in a matrass, the neck of which is cut off, but not too short: adapt the capital and the container to it: put it on the fire of ashes: distill from the first to the second degree: the most subtle water will rise: reserve it in particular, as being the first part: still distill the second part from the second degree to the third: put it also apart: after that distill the third part of the coarsest water, from third to fourth. By these three rectifications, you will have subtle water, more subtle water and very subtle water. Arrange them in order with their labels, following the separated and rectified air: though I must attribute the remaining liquid parts to the element of water, since they are moist and watery.

ground grinding

After you have separated and rectified these three elements, the sky, the air and the water, you will take the earth and divide it equally by rectification into three parts, in the following manner.

Take the product of the third separation of chaos; namely the vinegar or the acid with its phlegm, its oil and the mass reduced to charcoal: pulverize the charcoal: grind it with the oil: put it in a retort: ​​pour the acid into it: present the container, and distill the vinegar to the first degree. Then take it away; put it in another phial: after that distil the oil, and put it aside in another phial; at the end give it a fire of the fourth degree, for two hours: let extinguish the fire and cool the stove: draw the retorte from it, and remove the coal or the earth; in this way you will have the subtle earth or coal, the more subtle earth or oil, and the very subtle earth or acid. Put them away in order after the water.

So you have chaos separated and rectified. It must now be made to go to coagulation, to fixation, to regeneration, to quintessence in magisterium or arcana.

There will perhaps be people who will ask me what I want to do with the coal, which is calcined and reverberated ordinarily, or which is burned in ashes to extract the salt from it, by leaching. Will they not say that, apart from that, coal is good for nothing? But let them have patience until they see what I will say about it later, where I will tell them the reasons that make me act like this.

The coagulation, fixation and regeneration of chaotic water into quintessence, magisterium or arcana

You drew from the chaotic water, by separation, first four confused parts, and from these four parts you drew twelve, by rectification, that is, three parts of each, in order. Take coal, which is the subtle earth: mix it in a glass matrass with the more subtle earth; add to it the most subtle earth; by means of which the earthly parts will be conjoined: put them in a water bath for four days and four nights, increasing the fire from day to day, to the third degree and even to the fourth: adapt the capital and the container to it, so that, if anything rises, it can pass into the container. During this operation, the earthly mass or body will unite, coagulate and become fixed. The proof that it happened,is that if you take the matrass from the bain-marie and put it in the cellar, crystals will form there, or else the smell of the compost will be more sour. When this is done, put the matrass on the ash fire (the collar of the matrass must be cut, and not be too long): distill the humidity very slowly, until completely dry; it must be done in such a way that the sour vapors and the oil do not rise; this is why the degree of fire must be very gentle. until completely dry; it must be done in such a way that the sour vapors and the oil do not rise; this is why the degree of fire must be very gentle. until completely dry; it must be done in such a way that the sour vapors and the oil do not rise;this is why the degree of fire must be very gentle.

Many chemists are mistaken in the degree of fire; make it sometimes too strong, sometimes too weak. Here's a safe way to find it. Arrange all your stoves so that there are four or six registers: when you want to distil something, first open two or three registers, until you see what you want to distil rise: then close two registers, and leave only one open, which makes the first degree: distill in this degree all that can pass; and when it no longer rises, open the second register, so that it distils again, and until the distillation ceases by itself in this degree; then open the third and continue until it distills nothing more: do the same with the fourth, fifth and sixth registers;if in an hour or an hour and a half nothing will pass, open yet another, and when the distillation begins to go, close one of these registers, until it is necessary to reopen it. By doing so, you will not be able to make a mistake.

It is therefore necessary, as I have already said above, to separate all the moisture from the earth. If a little acid or oil rose at the same time, it would have to be poured back on the ground; but take good care of the degree of the fire: for if you give it too much and the oil rises, its fat will cling all over the matrass and you will lose a fluid or volatile and very noble part of your earth. It is an essential thing to observe for calcination and physical reverberation, that the most noble part of chaotic water freezes and fixes itself, and that what is too much or superfluous in it is detached by distillation. Nature takes in herself, at one time, only as much as she needs.When everything is coagulated, fixed and dried, then she needs moisture again: she takes as much as she needs, and leaves, like the first time, detach the superfluous. By observing this point well, we save ourselves much trouble, time and expense.

When the acid and the oil are well coagulated on the charcoal, when nothing has passed but an insipid water, without taste, sour and without strength, remove this water; for Nature herself has rejected it as a superfluity. When this is done, increase the heat a little, so that the material dries out even better in the glass matrass and that it is completely dry. This is the physical calcination and reverberation that must be repeated several times. In this way, the earth coagulates, fixes itself, becomes altered, and the drier and more altered it is, the more willingly it attracts its own humidity: for the salt must moisten the dry earth, otherwise it cannot produce the fruits of which it is capable.

Take therefore from the most subtle sky, three parts; from the more subtle sky, two parts; and from the subtle sky, apart: mingle them all together in a glass; in this way, one sky will have descended into the other, as we said in the first part, that is to say that the most subtle sky lets itself be caught and fixed in a thicker sky and that, descending more and more, it becomes air, water and earth, until finally it becomes completely terrestrial, as we will see here. When this is done, take very subtle air, three parts: more subtle air, two parts, and subtle air, one part: mix them alike; then take very subtle water, three parts: more subtle water, two parts: subtle water, one part: also mix them together; and, each part being joined, take the water,add to it the air and then the sky: all three, joined together, compose the nectar of ambrosia or the drink of the gods, which must rejuvenate our old man, revivify and regenerate him. For, therefore, of this water on the dry earth, as much as is necessary to moisten it and make it thick and honeyed: stir them well together with a wooden spatula: then add more water to it to reduce it to the consistency of melted clear honey. In this way it has, for this time, enough humidity for its growth: put the matrass in a bain-marie, at the first degree of the fire, and let it digest there for two days and two nights, so that the earth is well moistened and dissolved.Then distil the moisture in a bain-marie, and, if by these degrees nothing will pass, distill over the ash fire until the earth, by slow degrees, becomes quite dry and weathered, to the point of splitting. Observe, however, that at the beginning the fire is not too strong: for it is still too volatile.

When it will have been thus well dried, for new water into it: proceed as the first time, by soaking, distilling, drying and reverberating very gently in the fire of ashes, and continue these imbibitions and coagulations until the earth is sufficiently pregnant by the sky, the air and the water: what you will know at the next mark.

When you believe that it has drawn to itself a lot of sky, air and water, you will pour water into it which has been distilled from it, to the height of four fingers: put the flask in a water bath for twenty-four hours: dissolve and distill up to the third part: let the furnace cool, and put the flask in the cellar. If many crystals have formed there, you will judge that the volatile sky, the air and the water have coagulated, and that at the same time the earth has become very subtle. When you see this sign there, as it will not take long, it is time to proceed with the fixation.

So take the matrass: distill all the moisture from it in a bain-marie, and finally to the ashes: dry out the earth well, and give a little bit of fire; it will reverberate at the bottom of the matrass, and will become brown or red with other colors intermingled. This desiccation and reverberation to ashes will be completed in a day. During the night, remove the matrass;remove the matter with a wooden spatula: grind it very subtly: put it back in the matrass: pour in water that you have distilled, or new water, until it becomes like thick honey: put it back again in the bain-marie, and distill the moisture from it: then you will coagulate it and dry it in the ashes, and to make it reverberate, you will increase the fire a little, so that 'it acquires the same color as before: then let it cool: pull out the earth and grin say it again: put it back in the matrass again: pour in the moisture that you have drawn from it, as before, until thick honeyed consistency: put it back in the bain-marie, and then to the ashes . Coagulate, desiccate, reverberate, etc.

You will continue this operation until the earth becomes in a soft reverberation, and all of the same color; then it can suffer a stronger fire. When the earth is at this point, take it out of the matrass: grind it very finely: put it back in the matrass: moisten it with its water which you have distilled from it: then put it in the ashes: first distill the moisture from it gently: coagulate in the same way by degrees, and reverberate at the end with a fire a little stronger than before: for the earth which is at the bottom will still acquire by this a more fixed color, as you will see it by removing the matrass . When the furnace has cooled, remove the earth from the matrass: grind it again very finely, and proceed in everything in the same way as before.It is one and the same operation, the essence of which is now to reverberate the earth more strongly, and to make it all of the same color, and more and more resistant to fire. We must continue these imbibitions, coagulations and reverberations until the earth becomes, by a stronger reverberation to the ashes, fixed and red as fire in all its parts; then you will be able, by degrees, to reverberate it still more in the sand, until it is so fixed that it can support the open fire: then the magisterium is perfect. It is necessary however to observe not to be in a hurry to put it first, at the end of the fire of sand, in an open fire; but you will put it before by four or five degrees in the fire of iron flakes.If it sustains itself well and resists it, then lock it up in two crucibles fought together, and make it pass, by degrees, through a wheel fire for four hours; then in withdrawing it, you will see the sky and the most volatile water become a corporeal stone of the last fixity. It is in this state that we can say like Hermès: Vis ejus erit integra, si versa fuerit in terram .

This is a universal medicine, of which one, two, up to six grains, radically cure all diseases, and which restores the radical humidity, the animal spirit, vital and natural; finally all the animal and vital balm.

The Amateur will see, by this general example, how from the most volatile aqueous vapor comes the most fixed and stony body, and that the invisible and impalpable has become visible and palpable.

Let the Reader carefully consider this operation; because it is the model on which we must settle for all animals, plants and minerals. It is also necessary to begin by making them rot; then separate, rectify, coagulate, fix and regenerate them into a glorious, transparent body; and that by homogeneous things, as I will indicate below.

But, someone will say, this operation seems extraordinary. First, it is very long and very boring. Secondly, it is contrary to the rules of all Philosophers. They speak well, it will be said, of putrefaction, separation, distillation, conjunction, fixation, coagulation and regeneration; but they joined these principles, after the separation, in certain weights; shut them up in a flask; so that no perspiration, and even less no water, could come out of them: they cooked them in the same furnace, in the same vase, and by the same regime of fire, without touching them until they had reached their last perfection: instead that this author wants the parts to be joined, distilled, re-soaked, dried, coagulated, reverberated, draws the mace from the matrass,that we grind it, that we re-soak it again, that we distill it, that we dry it, that we coagulate it, that we reverberate it again, that we draw it from the bain-marie, that we put it in the ashes, then in the sand, then in the fire of iron flakes, and at the end, in the open fire: a method that no Philosopher has taught. With that, he does not say a word about the separation of the faeces, but he leaves all the impurities which all the Philosophers expressly order to be removed: otherwise, they say, the bitter would become rather a poison than a medicine.

The Philosophers also say that the fire must never be extinguished; that without this the work would perish; and this one interrupts the fire incessantly. Here is my answer.

I myself agree that this work is long and troublesome, and I have not put it here so that one is necessarily obliged to proceed in this way; but only so that the Reader may see how chaotic water can be separated into its degrees of subtlety, thickening and fixity. Nor do I claim to encourage anyone to follow this path, unless one wishes to undertake it out of curiosity. There are many other methods, shorter and more amusing, of which I will indicate some in the continuation.

Let the Reader remember here that I said, in the first part, that the great primordial chaos was separated into four parts, into sky, air, water and earth; that each of these four has further been divided and separated into its degrees of subtlety and thickening, as I demonstrated in the eighth chapter of the first part, in treating of the exhalations of the earth. We have shown in the process above, for the usefulness of the Reader, these degrees of subtlety and thickening, so that he sees that the more subtle always rises before the less subtle, and allows himself to be separated from them. This is followed immediately by the coarse; this one by the coarsest, and finally by the very coarse.

I have only mentioned this method so that everyone can see with their own eyes how Nature always works in the most beautiful order, without ever crossing the intermediate stages.

If the Reader imagines that I am proceeding against the rules of the Philosophers, I will reply to him, as I have done above, that I am not seeking the secret of the Philosophers; but that I am a Physicist or a Physophile, who exactly follows the ways of Nature and who scrupulously imitates all her operations. The Philosophers wrote as they wanted. I know, perhaps, their methods very well; but as I neither esteem nor despise them, I leave them as they are; and I am only mine, because I am certain that they conform to the laws of Nature.

It is she who taught me not to lock up the wet and the dry together in a jar, as the Philosophers do, and coagulate them by continual digestion, until they are completely dried up and reduced entirely to earth by continual fire. He who, by the true way of Nature, arrives at the goal and shortens the work, must win the prize.

In order that the elements of water and earth produce their fruits, Nature gives them from above the seed in the form of water, from which the earth takes and retains as much as it needs for its productions. It repels the superfluous and superabundant water by the lower and upper heat, that is, by the central subterranean heat and by the heat of the sun, driving it up into the air in the form of vapors and smoke, whence it falls and distills again on the earth. The earth still takes as much as it needs for its productions and their increase; the superfluous rises again in the air in the form of vapor, smoke and mist; and Nature will continue this circulation until the will of the Creator coagulates and fixes everything together in one stone.By this imbibition or distillation of the macrocosm, are born all the fruits of the earth, each according to its quality; for when the earth is parched and reverberated by the sun, the sky again supplies moisture, and again soaks it with rain and dew: then the sun returns and dries up, coagulates, reverberates the earth afresh and alters it, to attract other moisture to it.

By this operation of Nature, each Artist must learn the finest method of coagulating and fixing, as, in the seventh chapter of the first part, he must have learned from Nature herself the finest method of resolving and volatilizing; for he sees that each thing takes fire and water into itself only as much as it needs, and lets go of the superfluous.

Several Artists have ruined themselves, trying to coagulate and fix all the humidity of the subject they had in their hands. They consumed there a prodigious quantity of coal, and made such a great fire that their matrass was burst and all their treasure was lost in the ashes; by which they fell into such great distress and affliction that some died of melancholy.

What a miserable life! What a waste of time! They would have been wise if they had considered the course of Nature, which operates daily before their eyes, and which should serve every physicist as a model and precursor. However, I cannot blame them. In the beginning I thought, like them, of doing the most beautiful things by following my ideas; but the experience undeceived me. Finally, by continual contemplation of Nature and persistent work, I arrived at the method that I teach. I give it to the public as I learned it, with the consequences it had. Let those who want to follow this path abide by this treaty. They will certainly derive some satisfaction from it, at least as much as they hope to find in others.If they encounter any obstacles, let them have recourse to Nature and meditate on it.

One hears shouting from all sides: follow Nature; and no one can be found who has studied it properly. It is true that there are a large number of physicists who have written on Nature, and who have claimed to have described everything with the greatest exactness. They did what they could; but most, and almost all, described only the bark and not the interior; and by these writings they have, though innocently and without knowing it, led astray and ruined thousands of persons who have followed their doctrine and who have explained too much the thought of others, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, according to the idea which they have formed in their minds.

For me, I do not undertake to give a detailed description of all things. It would be an immense work and beyond my strength. I am satisfied in this little treatise to show in general, by theory and by practice, the course that Nature follows in her operations, so that all Artists can henceforth take her for guide. When they have understood some manipulations, they will be able to push their speculations further and confirm them by experience. In this way they will find the true way, and arrive at the desired goal.

Do we not see how much time is employed for the solution of a subject, and how much coal and expense are necessary for that? How long does it take to coagulate the liquid and fix it into a powder? Thus one works on a single subject, not only for several months, but for several years, and one collects only smoke.

The Artist who wants to coagulate a subject, must carefully consider the substances and the parts he has with him, namely water and spirit. Whether the spirit is hidden in water, whether it is in the form of salt or oil, in that of a subtle powder or in some other form whatsoever; it will never take in itself more water than it needs to become a coagulated and fixed body. As he lets detach from himself, by the violence of the fire, all the superfluous, he must be removed from him, by distillation, in imitation of Nature; and above all take care not to distil at too great a heat, but at a very low heat, in a bain-marie, and to recohober the humidity until the earth can support a greater fire.Then it no longer needs it: it must dry out more and more, and advance towards coagulation and fixation.

But, someone will say, how could I know that the spirit, which is in the water, attaches itself to the fixed body, coagulates there and fixes itself there, while I see that, by distillation, the water passes in the same quantity as I put there? I agree that I found the same difficulty before arriving at this knowledge; but pay attention to the following.

Water, as the receptacle, and the visible and sensible body, in which the invisible spirit or seed is concealed, is the only means by which all things mingle and unite, because all liquid and moist things mingle more easily in their smaller parts than dry ones. This water contains within itself the spirit or the seed and all its force, in a hidden and invisible way, and it is the vehicle of the spirit. The waters are subtle or coarse, according as they are extended, subtilized, thickened, and according as the seed or the spirit is volatile or fixed, the water adjusts with the seed, and the seed with the water.

For example, spirit of wine is water; vinegar is also water, as is oil; all that is liquid is water, different, indeed, according to the property of the coagulated or resolved spirit; for the spirit does not operate in the same way in the spirit of wine, in vinegar, in oil, in salt, in corrosive acids. Now, it is evident that all waters are resolved and liquid, which comes from the superfluous humidity which they contain. If they were coagulated, they would be dry; for the chemists call dry things coagulated, or coagulated things dry. This is why it is necessary to remove from them, by distillation, their superfluous moisture,and that in such a way that the spirit or the acid which remains hidden in this humidity does not pass at the same time with it; but let it stay behind and coagulate. The moisture must pass without any acid, like an insipid phlegm: then the seed coagulates instantly, and so promptly that the Artist will feel the greatest joy and be a thousand times more eager to embrace and practice the Art of Chemistry; because he sees that his operations are infallible like those of Nature which he proposes to imitate. and so promptly that the Artist will feel the greatest joy and be a thousand times more eager to embrace and practice the Art of Chemistry; because he sees that his operations are infallible like those of Nature which he proposes to imitate.and so promptly that the Artist will feel the greatest joy and be a thousand times more eager to embrace and practice the Art of Chemistry; because he sees that his operations are infallible like those of Nature which he proposes to imitate.

Consider therefore with attention, if you want to profit in this Art, that water or superfluous humidity is not the principal part which must be coagulated; but that it is the spirit or the seed which is hidden in the water which coagulates, concentrates and is fixed by its own fixed part or, to make myself understood better, by its own acid and by its alkaline part; then the superfluous humidity, or the recolated water, detaches itself from it, and the seed retains in itself, for its consistency, only what is necessary to form and to maintain a body in a permanent and incorruptible humidity. It holds this moisture which it has drawn so strongly, that they constantly melt and flow together in all kinds of fire, like wax and without smoking. We see this in stone and glass,from which superfluous humidity has been extracted to the highest degree; they retain no more than they need to be able to flow like oil in the strongest and most violent fire, without any diminution of their consistency, unless, by Nature or by Art, they are demoted.

It would be a great work for the Artist as well as for Nature if it were necessary to coagulate all the superfluous water or humidity, as much as each individual has of it concentrated in himself, in earth, in dry powder or in stone: this would not, however, be impossible; but besides that it would be useless, the longer life of a Philosopher would not suffice to succeed in it. Let us just try it, by enclosing rainwater or spring water in a phiole, and putting it on the fire to coagulate it: we will indeed find soil there, but in six months, and even in a year, we will not notice that the water has diminished in quantity, or so little as nothing, nor that it has coagulated.

We will therefore imitate Nature, which in the animal kingdom does not change all moisture into animal or animal parts. If so, he would not excrete excrement by perspiration or by other means. In the same way also in vegetables all the humidity does not become vegetable; otherwise they would not give gums, resins as we can see, mainly in spring, in large plants and trees whose barks, by the too great abundance of superfluous humidity, split and let flow the superabundant juice in different forms. Likewise also, not all moisture joins minerals and stones in their growth; if that were so, one would not see flowing from the mountains so many large rivers, fountains, springs.

Thus all the rain, dew, snow, etc., is not employed in increasing the productions of the earth; if that were so, the central and terrestrial heat and that of the sun could not sublimate nor attract any vapor or exhalation; instead we see that they make so many vapors every day, and in such large quantities that there is abundantly formed dew, rain, snow, which are again precipitated on the earth. By which Nature teaches us the imbibition and cohobation of the macrocosm: she does not give at one time enough moisture so that her productions have enough, until their perfection; but it still cohabits, continually soaking little by little, and drying out again.

Everyone can therefore clearly see that the water only serves as the envelope or vehicle of the seed or the spirit (as we have sufficiently demonstrated in the first part) and that it is not itself the seed or the spirit; that for this reason it does not want to be coagulated entirely, but only as much as the seed needs. the earth would retain no more than it needs to coagulate with it: but if the water also contains earth or fixed parts in it, they will remain behind with the earth which is its like.

The seed or spirit operates in species or individuals in the same way as in universals. When this spirit has become fixed, it takes and attracts to itself the volatile spirit similar to itself to fix it; in the same way he allows the superfluous water, in which this volatile spirit was hidden, to detach, almost in the same quantity as it was before. It is in this way that the like units with its like, and attracts it to itself, according to the axiom: Natura naturam ambit et amplectitur; natura natura gaudet , and for the same reason, an opposite drives out and repels its opposite when it comes to forming a union and a constant unity.

Until the water and the seed or the spirit are truly and constantly united in one body, there will never be any constant and permanent union, nor any fixity; this is seen clearly in animals and vegetables which are of a corruptible nature, and of very easy resolution, because they abound in recolated or superfluous water. Several minerals are not too deprived either; for as long as recolated water or superfluous, tasteless moisture is not separated from them, they are subject to weathering, corruption, and resolution; this is what happens to animals and vegetables, which, because of their superfluous humidity, are very easily corrupted, especially when it is added to them externally by rain, water, snow, &c. The minerals are corrupted in the same way,

Let the Reader recognize that the recolated water serves as a hammer or anvil to the seed or to the spirit implanted therein, which, by its means, is awakened and excited to act; for he would never know how to stand still in the waters; but there it continually causes alterations one after another. When that spirit is coagulated and fixed, that by this operation it is deprived of its superfluous moisture, and desiccated, as happens in stones, minerals, metals, precious stones, glass, etc., there it is dormant, concentrated, and pushed to its greatest strength, and it remains in this state constantly and incorruptibly, until it is awakened by its moisture-likeness; for then he seeks to solve such a coagulated body, in his first madeira,

Someone could object to me that the excrements of animals, vegetables, and minerals, which Nature evacuates and expels, are not recolated water, a being or substance without force; but that these waters are still full of seed and spirit, and participate very strongly in the essence of the body which expels them, like urine, from that of man, gums and resins, from that of trees, and mineral waters, from that of mines. I say first that Nature having found them superfluous for the growth and preservation of the body already begun or engendered, she wanted to expel them; secondly, that by the will of the Creator, Nature does not propose exaltation in quintessence, as man has been able to do by Art; thirdly,that it teaches men to address themselves to the excrement which flows from the bodies without damaging them, and to seek what is necessary for them for the maintenance of their life and for their preservation, without finding themselves obliged to attack the body itself; each of these excrements being, according to its quality, filled with strength and virtues.

In the animal kingdom Nature has given us excrement, like urine, mainly droppings, then sweat, snot, sputum which comes from the stomach and lungs, tears from the eyes, wax from the ears. In the vegetable kingdom it has provided us with the gums and liquors which flow out of them, the seed, the leaves and the stems. It is not necessary to take the whole body of animals, nor to draw the root of plants from the earth, since the things mentioned above have the same force as the root.

Nor is it necessary, in order to have a quintessence of the mineral kingdom, to take the very body of the metals. Instead of gold, an Artist can use solar marcasites, solar vitriol, solar sulphurous minerals, fixed and embryonic sulphurs, that is to say those found in antimony, in hematite, in hemeril, in magnet, all of which parttake of the cordial and corroborative nature of gold.

It is the same with the other red stars and the white stars; for, as antimony has in it the volatile embryonic sulfur of gold, so bismuth contains the volatile embryonic sulfur of silver; calamine and tutia contain its fixed sulphur, and is not gold also a perfect lunar vitriol? An Amateur can therefore see that Nature has presented us with not one subject of human nature, but several, and more than we need. Where Nature ends, the Artist must begin, and remove superfluous humidity from all these subjects. Nature gives us the example of this in the mines, and shows us the means by which we can arrive at quintessence and incorruptible fixity; for in the mines it forces the most durable bodies which cannot be destroyed by water and air,and even can only be so very slowly by fire. It is to this incorruptible fixity that the Artist must tend: he will have a means of obtaining health and a long life. The secret is, as we have said, to separate the superfluous moisture from the subject and to concentrate the spirit or the seed.

But someone will be able to ask me if this superfluous humidity, or recolated water, is entirely deprived of all spirit, force and virtue, so that it can no longer serve any purpose. I answer that the recolated water can never be absolutely and totally separated from the spirit or the seed, so that it no longer contains in itself any hidden force, nor any ray of the spirit; that it is also impossible for the spirit to be entirely separated from the recolated water; but that it always participates in this water, even if it were pushed to the fixity of stone, and coagulated as much as one would like; for water is all spirit, and spirit is water; they are not distinct from each other by their essence, but only by their accidents and by their operations;they are one and the same,

The more the mind becomes fixed and coagulated, the more it acquires a superior force to act. If in its resolution, in the form of dew and rain, it had as much force as it has in its extreme coagulation of gold or carbuncle, the water of rain thus believed would be a universal medicine, and one would not need to torment oneself to resolve the individuals and the coagulated seeds and reduce them to quintessence and magisterium. But as, according to the word of Hermes, its strength is not complete until it is converted into earth, it is necessary, for this reason, to concentrate and fix this dilated spirit in the form of water; then he acquires vim integram, and fortitudinem fortissimam .So when I call superfluous water a recolaceum or useless phlegm, it is not that it is without virtue; it is like the despised cornerstone, which however has become the most useful stone, and the most solid support of the building; for it is the concentrated spirit's own vehicle, by means of which, when insinuated into a diseased body, that spirit or quintessence is awakened and mingled with the diseased archeaea, whereby that archeaeae is strengthened and enabled to expel its enemy, which infirms it.

The real reason why we separate this recolated water is because it is a seed that is still too far away in the oil or in the first matter, and has not yet been disposed enough or become salty enough through putrefaction or fermentation; for saltiness is the beginning and the foundation of all coagulation, and the nearest thing in the earth, to be converted into a precious stone. This is why recolated water, being removed from this saltiness, cannot be coagulated and become terrestrial, or only very slowly; whereas spirit, being of a spermatic saline nature and disposed to coagulate, however volatile it may be, can coagulate much sooner than recolated water. However, if this water also becomes, by fermentation, of a saline nature,it also allows itself to be coagulated, like the seed and the spirit; but as it only lets itself coagulate with incredible slowness, we separate it by distillation, to shorten our work and save time: and if we call it useless, we do not mean to say anything else except that, for this work, it is superfluous and unsuitable; because we know that the Creator created the smallest atom of earth, the smallest drop of water for his honor, for his glory and for the usefulness of his creatures. Let the reader consider this discourse well, it does not contain a single useless word. If at one time he does not fully understand its meaning, let him meditate on it until he understands it well.we separate it by distillation, to shorten our work and save time: and if we call it useless, we do not mean to say anything else except that, for this work, it is superfluous and unsuitable; because we know that the Creator created the smallest atom of earth, the smallest drop of water for his honor, for his glory and for the usefulness of his creatures. Let the reader consider this discourse well, it does not contain a single useless word. If at one time he does not fully understand its meaning, let him meditate on it until he understands it well. we separate it by distillation, to shorten our work and save time: and if we call it useless, we do not mean to say anything else except that, for this work, it is superfluous and unsuitable;because we know that the Creator created the smallest atom of earth, the smallest drop of water for his honor, for his glory and for the usefulness of his creatures. Let the reader consider this discourse well, it does not contain a single useless word. If at one time he does not fully understand its meaning, let him meditate on it until he understands it well. the smallest drop of water for his honor, for his glory and for the usefulness of his creatures. Let the reader consider this discourse well, it does not contain a single useless word. If at one time he does not fully understand its meaning, let him meditate on it until he understands it well. the smallest drop of water for his honor, for his glory and for the usefulness of his creatures.Let the reader consider this discourse well, it does not contain a single useless word. If at one time he does not fully understand its meaning, let him meditate on it until he understands it well.

So that an Amateur sees with his own eyes that it is only the sharp and salty seed that coagulates quickly, and not the recolated water, let him pay attention to the following example, which will make him touch with his hands what he cannot perceive in a chaotic or universal subject.

Take very ripe bunches of grapes: squeeze out the juice: ferment it (which is its putrefaction); you will have wine. Or take, if you like, a wine already made; the older it is, the better it is: put it in any quantity you like in an alembic: distill its fiery spirit: then rectify it, until it is proof against powder, and you will have its volatile. Then distil again until the thickness of the honey: mix it with bricks, from which, by leaching, the light powder is well removed, so that this powder of bricks first falls to the bottom of the water without floating (without which you could not separate the caput mortuum well): dry this mixture until you can make balls of it: put them in a retorte, on a sand fire: adapt a container crush to it: distill by degrees ;you will draw from it first a coarse phlegm, then a sour spirit, which is followed by a thick, fetid oil, which you will draw out by a degree of open fire; there will remain in the retorte a caput mortuum: burn the coal, which is the alkaline part: draw it from the retorte: reduce it to powder with your hands: fill a deep terrine with water, and throw the powder into it; the flour from the bricks will fall to the bottom, the coal will float on the water; remove it with a feather: preserve it: take the water, filter it and coagulate it, you will find the alkaline salt of the wine: take this salt and the charcoal powder: dry them both well: grind them with the fetid oil: then put them in a matrass: pour acid or vinegar over them: put them in a bain-marie for a day and a night,after having covered it with its capital and having adapted the receptacle, you will distil from it in a water bath by degrees all the humidity or recolaceum, which will want to pass: delute the capital and the receptacle: pour over the residue of the spirit of wine or of the volatile: put the capital and the receptacle again, and distill slowly in a water bath; only pure phlegm or recolated water will pass; all the strength of the spirit-of-wine will remain with the seed, or with the acid and the alkali. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder;the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it. you will distil from it in a bain-marie by degrees all the humidity or recolaceum, which will want to pass: dilute the capital and the container: pour on the residue of the spirit of wine or of the volatile: put the capital and the container again, and distill slowly in a bain-marie; only pure phlegm or recolated water will pass; all the strength of the spirit-of-wine will remain with the seed, or with the acid and the alkali. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder;the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it. you will distil from it in a bain-marie by degrees all the humidity or recolaceum, which will want to pass: dilute the capital and the container: pour on the residue of the spirit of wine or of the volatile: put the capital and the container again, and distill slowly in a bain-marie; only pure phlegm or recolated water will pass; all the strength of the spirit-of-wine will remain with the seed, or with the acid and the alkali. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder;the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it. for over the residue of the spirit of wine or of the volatile oil: put the capital and the container back on, and distill slowly in a bain-marie; only pure phlegm or recolated water will pass; all the strength of the spirit-of-wine will remain with the seed, or with the acid and the alkali. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder; the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it.for over the residue of the spirit of wine or of the volatile oil: put the capital and the container back on, and distill slowly in a bain-marie; only pure phlegm or recolated water will pass; all the strength of the spirit-of-wine will remain with the seed, or with the acid and the alkali. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder; the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder;the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it. If it still rose a little spirit with the phlegm, this spirit-of-wine will be so weak in comparison with what it was before, that it will no longer be proof against the powder; the reason is that the earth has attracted the spirit as much as it needed and let the superfluous detach from it.

By this operation, an Artist will be able to conceive in what way the seed or the saline spirit coagulates and fixes itself, and how it allows the superfluous humidity to detach from itself. This effect cannot be seen in universal water or rain; because its volatile principles are nearly all alike in smell, taste, color, and have no specific qualities, or sensible acidity, like those of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms which are specified. The spirit of wine, the spirit of urine and the spirit of vitriol have a noticeable acidity. When the latter is coagulated on his alkali, for a day and a night, when the alembic has been covered with its capital and the recipient has been adapted to it, he distills the acid from it in a bain-marie.The phlegm or recolated water remains empty, soft, without smell or taste, like simple fountain water. We see from this that this acidity must necessarily have some particular and different qualities from insipid water; this acidity is the spirit or the seed which, by putrefaction and fermentation, has taken on a saline and coagulant nature.

After the Artist has coagulated the vinegar and the spirit of wine on the coal and on the salt, and that he will have distilled the recolated water, let him reflect on the quantity of phlegm and acidity or semen that he will have drawn from his distilled wine; he will find that the recolated water greatly exceeds the seed, that he weighs beforehand the spirit of wine which he will have rectified to the test of gunpowder; after he has poured it over its fixed parts and has distilled the recolated water from it, let him weigh this water again and see what small quantity of acidity or seed was hidden in this water, even though the Artist believed that the spirit of wine was stripped of all phlegm, since it ignited the powder.By this test he will know that the spirit of wine contains, to very few things, as much phlegm as it weighs, and that its sharpness,

To give recolated water the praise it deserves, I must say that it is an excellent radical moist, purified, which restores that of our bodies, and which the Labels and those who have consumption, should use for ordinary drink; but it should only be understood from this recolacé water, from which the spirit of wine, which ignites the powder, has been coagulated and fixed; for it is a very pure mercury, vegetable, universal, insipid, volatile and coagulable, etc. By this operation, the Reader will see that it is only the seed, the spirit and the acuity, or the saline spermatic substance of all things, which allows itself to be coagulated, and not the recolated water.Now, if an Artist separates the recolated water from the seed, the coagulation takes place in the moment, which is immediately followed by fixation.

I said that the earth was satiated with the spirit of wine, and that it still allowed some sharpness to pass through with the recolated water. One could be embarrassed to know how to go about coagulating and also fixing this acuity or any other that will have passed; it is very easy. There is, as I have already said, to dry up and alter what is coagulated, or the earth itself, by a soft reverberation to the ashes; that is to say, dry it very gently; for then the alkali, the coagulant or the earth become again eager to attract the rest of the seed which has passed, to coagulate and fix it, only the water will pass again, tasteless and without taste, like pure water from a fountain;and you will have the magisterium of wine, the quintessence or the vegetable arcana, etc. It is the same with all plants and animals, as we will teach later. When the coagulation is done, the fixation follows afterwards, that is to say, it is necessary to reverberate this arcana more and more to the ashes, until it can support the fourth degree of fire; then we put it in the sand until it can support this degree: after that we continue with the other degrees, as we have said above.

The reader sees by this quod Natura gaudeat Natura propria; Natura recipiat Naturam; Natura amplectatur Naturam, et contrarium seu non necessarium ipsa repellet . At the same time that Nature rejects the heterogeneous and the superfluous, she takes and attracts to herself what is pleasant to her, quickly and not slowly; though it seems to go slowly towards perfection: for in perfecting it hastens with great diligence, as you will experience in practice.

The reason I don't have a stove, or a continual fire regimen; that I jump from the bain-marie to the ashes, from there to the sand, to the iron flakes and to the open fire, and that thus I interrupt the heat, it is because in this I am Nature who teaches me that, if I want to harden and coagulate something, I must not always cook it in water, because it softens everything instead of hardening it. As my intention is to fix my medicine more and more, I also give more and more a stronger degree of fire, as Nature does; because a weak heat cannot make a constant and fixed body, and I see that ashes, iron flakes and open fire still give a stronger heat; that the stronger the fire, the more it fixes the mind,and the more the recolated water separates from it and lets the spirit and the seed advance, until the last coagulation of the stone and the glass. For Nature makes, in the watery degree, aquatic animals cold and of easy corruption; and the dryer the heat it uses, the more durable its productions. We see indeed that, to make fish and their species, she uses the vessel of water; that for the perfect animals which have their dwellings on earth and in the air, it makes use of a little dry heat; that for plants, which have a harder and drier body than animals, it employs a stronger and drier heat; we also see that the sun darts its rays continuously and strongly there as well as on the earth on which they grow, and, as they cannot move from their place,they are extremely heated and dried out; whereas mobile animals can avoid this heat, in whole or in part, and take refuge in the shade or coolness. Minerals, on the contrary, need an even stronger heat, inner and central, by which they are coagulated in different ways, even to stone. The closer the mines approach the center of the earth, the more heat they have to withstand. As, in an animal, the strongest natural heat is concentrated in the stomach, chiefly in winter, so also the strongest heat of the earth is concentrated in the ventricle of the great Demogorgon, or in the center of the earth; without this Nature could not sublimate such a great quantity of vapors to the surface of the earth. However, the closer a subject is to the center of the earth,the more firmly it is fixed, provided that the great quantity of humidity which continually rises does not impede it. The strongest and best metallic veins are also found towards the center; the branches are extended very thin in the circumference; because the more the central heat rises, the more it weakens; so much so that she cannot fix everything perfectly. From there it happens that, almost everywhere, many minerals pierce to the surface of the earth, which are not quite matured into metal but into minerals of vitriol, alum, sulphur, marcasite, lead, tin, etc. The strongest and best metallic veins are also found towards the center; the branches are extended very thin in the circumference;because the more the central heat rises, the more it weakens; so much so that she cannot fix everything perfectly. From there it happens that, almost everywhere, many minerals pierce to the surface of the earth, which are not quite matured into metal but into minerals of vitriol, alum, sulphur, marcasite, lead, tin, etc. The strongest and best metallic veins are also found towards the center; the branches are extended very thin in the circumference; because the more the central heat rises, the more it weakens; so much so that she cannot fix everything perfectly.From there it happens that, almost everywhere, many minerals pierce to the surface of the earth, which are not quite matured into metal but into minerals of vitriol, alum, sulphur, marcasite, lead, tin, etc.

Someone may object to me and say: if Nature works metals in such great heat and drought, why is there so much water in the earth?

It is true that there is a lot of water in the earth, and even more in its center; but it is impossible for the waters to accumulate in such great quantities in the places where Nature designs to form metals. For if such a quantity of water were found together, in the places where Nature wants to make metallic guhr, this water would soften this guhr and its vitriolic salt, would carry it with it towards the surface, and the cavities of the earth would remain empty, because the water would prevent any metallic growth; but as water does not flow abundantly in all places where metals are formed, Nature fills those places with her corrosive vapours, which cling to rocks and stones, corrode them by resolving them, and make enough guhr of them to stuff and fill the cavities of the earth,like bees fill their cells with wax. When Nature has completely filled these places, no moist vapor can penetrate them; this is why this guhr concentrates, coagulates, dries up and becomes fixed more and more, until it becomes a rich stone, in metal which can resist water and fire.

It is true that in places where there is a large quantity of water, as in marshes, ponds and subterranean lakes, the vapors rise there and the mineral seed enters and accumulates there; but it is drowned there: and when the water rises towards the surface, the cold air coagulates this seed, and makes of it a metallic matter which remains in the waters, precipitates in its time, and forms all kinds of electra, gums, bad mineral juices and bitumens. What flows back to the center again lends itself to being sublimated to the circumference, and to taking its species in its determined place.

There is therefore, in the places where Nature works metals, no subterranean waters which can prevent it in its functions. If that were so, how would the miners extract from the mines so much dry, hard and stony minerals, etc., not soft and watery ones? One finds in the mines no other water than that which can come from the subterranean vapours, copious, which have accumulated, resolved in various clefts of the rocks, and which sometimes flow from them, like little fountains, between the metallic veins.

There will surely be Readers who will have a bad idea of ​​my operation, because I interrupt the heat and let the work cool. They must consider that I do not seek to make animals but fixed things like stone, which does not spoil and corrupt so quickly: and Nature shows me the way which I must follow; since it cooks its productions during the day, and heats them by the sun; that at night it moistens and cools them with the moon, and thus interrupts the heat without doing them any harm. Above all, they must be careful that Art does not propose to bring about the same generations as Nature; it would be a useless and superfluous curiosity, since Nature itself exempts us from this trouble. He has in view a different generation,that is to say, a generation in quintessence, permanent, immortal, glorified; a spiritual body and a corporeal spirit. Its object is to separate corrupting or recolate moisture from creatures, and to make a stony, saline medicine, of easy solution in any moisture which, being taken internally, can penetrate through the whole body, from the stomach to the extremity of the bones and the marrow, as smoke penetrates into the air; and whose property is to fortify Nature and to help her to overcome the obstacles which harm her operations. The result will be perfect healing of all diseases; for a skilful physician knows well that infirm Nature needs only to be fortified; and there can be no better comfort than the quintessence in which all is in the utmost purity,

People will no doubt be surprised that, in my operation, I did not separate any faeces; for this separation is so fashionable that no one wants to do anything else, without having examined what the faeces are, and without knowing that he rejects the grain, while he preserves the bark. If I do not separate any faeces, it is because I do not know any in Nature. I maintain that everything she does, without exception, is pure, good and wholesome; that everything must stay together, and that we couldn't do without it.

I will therefore say, to make myself understood, that I only give the name of faeces to a contrary which has been joined externally to a subject. As, for example, if I gave a man a stone, a mineral, a corrosive or a poison for his food, one would soon see that they are contrary to him and heterogeneous. This is faces for man; because Nature did not intend minerals, nor poison for her food, but vegetables such as bread, wine which are suitable and homogeneous for her. This is why each thing attracts to itself its like, and rejects what is contrary to it like an excrement; but this excrement is not absolutely faeces in every sense, or damned earth that can be of no use. If it is not proper to one thing, intend it for some other.

Thus all heterogeneous things, which should not be joined together immediately, such as minerals and animals, are faeces in relation to each other. However, although minerals and animals are immediately contrary to each other and seem to be heterogeneous in their species and individuals, they are nevertheless, to consider them in their universality or in their essence, the same thing and intrinsically homogeneous; since they have taken their origin from a single and unique raw material and they can easily, by the mediums which are specific to them, taken from the vegetable kingdom, be made homogeneous.

I therefore say that there is absolutely no faeces in Nature, that is to say that nothing is useless there; that everything contained in an individual or a universal thing is indispensably necessary to it. Whence, indeed, would come so many impurities in Nature since all things have taken their origin from a very pure God, and have been made of him and by him. But I will demonstrate by experiment that the so-called faeces which the chymists reject contain the most fixed tincture of everything.

If one slowly distils in an alembic an animal or a vegetable, putrefied beforehand, one draws from it a spirit and a recolacé phlegm; if one then pushes the residues through the retort and distils from it, by degrees, all that can pass: one has a coarse phlegm, then a strong and sour liquor, which is the acid which I also call vinegar or azoth. This azoth is followed by a greasy, fetid oil; and the caput mortuum remains at the bottom of the retort, in the form of coal. Minerals also yield, by distillation, spirit, phlegm, acid or azoth, oil, and a caput mortuum; but as they are strongly fermented or coagulated bodies, their spirit is not so volatile as that of the other two kingdoms;their phlegm is more subtle, their acid very corrosive, and their oil still more corrosive. The Chemists shoot,

But let them know that coal is a pure sulfur or a coagulated oil, and that the oil is, in its center, a resolved and liquid coal which can easily be reduced to coal; because when in a high curcurbite one draws from it, with the fire of ashes, its moist by degrees, there remains at the bottom only a black matter like coal, which however was oil before; and the moisture which has been taken from it is a very sour vinegar; which again proves the truth of our doctrine, namely that the principles do not differ from each other because of their origin and their madeira, but only because of their solution and coagulation, their volatility and fixity, their subtlety or density. Thus coal is a coagulated oil;oil a coagulated or concentrated acid or azoth, and azoth a volatile spirit, coagulated or concentrated; and instead, the volatile spirit is a vinegar rarefied and made subtle; vinegar a rarefied oil, and this a coal; but if you burn the coal in salt and ashes, it acquires a greater fixity; and if the ashes and salt are melted into glass, then the subject is in the highest degree of constant and incorruptible fixity.

To examine charcoal by analysis, the Artist must observe that each thing must become again what it was before, by means of what it originated from. For example, coal used to be an oil; the oil was a vinegar or azoth; thus the coal must again become oil by means of the oil, and the oil must again become vinegar by the vinegar, since it was vinegar. We have proved above that the thing was thus, by showing that all the subtle parts become more and more thick, coagulated and fixed by digestion; that, on the contrary, all thick things, by digesting them in a greater quantity of exhausted parts, become exhausted and subtilized; for if we immediately put the subtle parts with coarse parts in the same weight, number and measure,one could not overcome the other, and it would rather result in a third thing. This is why if one wants to change one thing into another, one must always add to it an excess quantity and quality. Thus, if I want to volatilize fixed things, I must add a greater quantity of volatile to them, otherwise I would not know how to overcome its opposite; and likewise, if I want to fix volatile things, I must add a greater quantity of fixed to them; without that, I would never be able to bind the volatile bird. without which I would not be able to conquer its opposite; and likewise, if I want to fix volatile things, I must add a greater quantity of fixed to them; without that, I would never be able to bind the volatile bird.without which I would not be able to conquer its opposite; and likewise, if I want to fix volatile things, I must add a greater quantity of fixed to them; without that, I would never be able to bind the volatile bird.

In this manner, if you wish to reduce the coal to oil again, according to the order and rule of Nature, take a portion of fine pulverized coal; grind it with three or four parts of its clean, thick, fetid oil; then for into it six parts of its own acid; put them to cook in a bain-marie, in a high cucurbite, with its capital and container; oil will resolve carbon, acid will resolve and exhaust oil; thus everything will become liquor, and everything will rise together through the retort. If you want to make it even more volatile, pour into it from its own volatile spirit; digest it in a water bath; then put everything back in a wrong;it will rise and pass more and more quickly through the alembic, according as you have added more volatile spirit to it. You see by this how one principle coagulates the other, resolves it, thickens it, subtilizes it, fixes it and volatilizes it, as we have said above. It is in this way that true quintessences can be made, very different from those weak tinctures extracted by the spirit of wine.

What proves that charcoal is not faeces, but the most fixed tincture of everything, is that one part of charcoal being resolved, it resolves others more and more, until the whole body of charcoal is reduced to liquor; for the volatile parts which passed first must also resolve the more fixed parts which remained behind, and volatilize them.

Another proof that charcoal is not faeces, is that if you melt some salt of tartar, and put dust of any charcoal whatsoever on it, as much as the salt of tartar can take, you will see the salt of tartar take on a dark blue, blackish, and greenish color, because of the abundant tincture. For in this melted salt, pound it very quickly, for in the most rectified spirit of wine; it will be tinted in a few hours and will attract the dye to itself; then take this blue salt of tartar, melted; cook it well with fountain water; filter it and precipitate the sulfur with an eau-forte, a vinegar, a spirit of vitriol, or with any other acid; you will find at the bottom a sulfur which will not yield it in color to that of the Sun, of Mars, of Venus and of antimony,and which will show itself in etching as dark a yellow color as the sun can make it. This shows the qualities that are hidden in coal.

The chemists ought to have noticed this, especially since they attribute very great virtues to the tincture of the salt of tartar; but they absolutely want this tincture, which they believe to be so constant and so effective, to come from salt; I will prove to them how wrong they are. When the salt of tartar is melted by the charcoal fire, every Artist can see that the charcoal makes flames of all kinds of colors, such as reds, greens and blues; now these colors come only from the sulfur of coal which, being acid, readily attaches itself to the salt of tartar which is an alkali, and which attracts it to itself as it is reciprocally attracted to it.The flames being dispersed in very subtle atoms, this salt of tartar thus remains for a long time in fusion before being colored; but if by the inadvertence of him who works, he jumps a particle of coal on the salt of tartar in the crucible, this salt turns blue on the spot. If after that it remains too long in fusion, it loses its color and becomes again as it was before; for the reason that it consumes coal and converts it into its nature by a very violent calcination: thus this treasure passes into the form of salt.

I am going to teach a method by which one can make in large quantities and more cheaply not only the tincture of the salt of tartar, but also that of the fixed salt of any individual, animal, vegetable or mineral, to which the chymists have attributed, without much reason, such great virtues, and that by their own salt, without any foreign salt: that is to say, the tincture of the alkali salt extracted from each subject, whatever it may be, as for example wine: pounds, or vines: put four pounds in an un glazed pot, without covering it; put the two other books in another jar that you will cork and seal well; put these two pots in a potter's furnace; let them redden well and calcine. By removing the pots from the fire, you will find the material of the white open pot,and that of the black covered pot; wash off the white mass in water; filter, coagulate and melt it in a crucible: then take the dark matter; pulverize it and mix it little by little with this cast iron tartar salt until it flows very thick and of a blue, blackish color; then pour it quickly into a cast iron mortar to pulverize it: put the powder in a matrass; for over it the most rectified spirit of wine, put it in a gentle heat night and day, and it will extract the tincture from it; gently decant it from the residue; you will have a veritable tincture of the salt of tartar. then take dark matter;pulverize it and mix it little by little with this cast iron tartar salt until it flows very thick and of a blue, blackish color; then pour it quickly into a cast iron mortar to pulverize it: put the powder in a matrass; for over it the most rectified spirit of wine, put it in a gentle heat night and day, and it will extract the tincture from it; gently decant it from the residue; you will have a veritable tincture of the salt of tartar. then take dark matter; pulverize it and mix it little by little with this cast iron tartar salt until it flows very thick and of a blue, blackish color; then pour it quickly into a cast iron mortar to pulverize it: put the powder in a matrass;for over it the most rectified spirit of wine, put it in a gentle heat night and day, and it will extract the tincture from it; gently decant it from the residue; you will have a veritable tincture of the salt of tartar.

Take the same from an animal or a vegetable, as much as you want: divide it, as above, and burn them at the same time in the same furnace, one pot open and the other closed; wash out one, and melt the matter; for the black mass until it is sufficiently tinted with it; then draw the tincture with the spirit of wine, or with its own volatile, and you will have the true tincture of each individual.

With regard to minerals or metals, they must be demoted into vitriol, and calcined in a potter's furnace, part of it with an open pot (it must however be taken care that the heat is not strong enough to put them back in the fusion in a metallic body, but that they remain there in a spongy body, like the caput mortuum of vitriol); take the alkali salt from the calcined part with an open pot, melt it and put in it from the other part as much as it can take, so that the salt remains in flux; the salt will color; then for it, and pulverize it; for in some spirit of wine, and you will have an extract, or a tincture similar to that above.

You will therefore have made all things with the spirit-of-wine which, without despising the waters of the apothecaries, will have a hundred times more virtue than theirs, and if you are curious to know how much tincture or sulfur your colored spirit-of-wine contains, you have only to distill it in a bain-marie; you will find only a very small quantity of powder which is the sulfur of charcoal, which acts so powerfully. Consider then, gentlemen chymists, that in throwing away the caput mortuum or coal, you throw away a tincture which, in such small doses, has such great effects that a certain author sold it for astral potable gold, and attributed to it incredible virtues, having imagined that it had drawn the sulfur of the sun from the air on hot summer days.However, it all came from a little coal dust,

If such a sulfur can do such great things, in so small a quantity, and in such a time that it is not yet rendered volatile and reduced to liquor, but only extracted and subtilized into the fixed form by the spirit-of-wine, what will it do when, by its own principles, as I have taught above, it is reduced to a distillable liquor? The above-mentioned author called his extract drinking gold. What title can we give to it, since the solvent and the dissolved remain joined together, and the fixed and the volatile are inseparably united there?

When the chymists have burnt the coal into ashes, and from the latter they have extracted the salt by leaching, they imagine that they have done their best and have separated the fixed; but let them go to a glass factory; they will see there that the ashes become a solid body, which the fire cannot overcome; a regenerated, glorious body, like a precious stone; and they will conclude, if they have a little judgment, that what they reject is the most fixed part, subjectum fixius, and corpus figens fixissimum.

Tell me, Chemists, is it not your aim that your tinctures take on the nature of glass, gems and rubies? Without it you wouldn't care. Now, if you throw away the vitrifying essence, how do you claim to make a tincture that is fixed and so constant in all degrees of fire? Do you not see that the salts melt in the fire, in truth; but also that they continually evaporate there and diminish in quantity? That oil has no constancy, and that acid is in itself volatile? So see what you forget all the time, and what you despise. This is why several Philosophers say that one takes the bark and throws away the fruit. If you want to fix, first provide yourself with a fixed body as the basis of fixity.An architect chooses the strongest stones to make the foundations of the building he wants to erect. Take the fixed likewise, and fix after its own volatile, according to the order and laws of Nature itself; then you will get real medicine.

The common opinion is that animals and plants contain nothing fixed within them. All minds are so preoccupied with the ideas of faeces, or damned earth, that the best, purest, most transparent, most brilliant, most fixed parts of all animals and plants, and sometimes even minerals, are thrown away without scruple. Also nothing could be fixed, unless something was borrowed from the mineral kingdom; but if we had considered the hermaphroditic, animal and vegetable sulfur of coal, which is fixed and not fixed, and with what promptitude it can be fixed or volatilized, we would have judged quite differently. For what are the ashes? They are nothing but fixed and fixed vegetable and animal sulphur, mixed with dust, sand and other impurities in hearths and stoves;because of which he cannot show his ivory whiteness; but if one took coal and let it redden in an unglazed pot, in the most violent open flame, until it was reduced to ashes, one would then see its lunar whiteness and its unfailing constancy. This ash, or sulfur made of coal, is not so good, however, as when it appears in its cinnamon color, as we have shown above; which color it acquires by its own alkali, or by another; and even this has not nearly so much strength as that which, with its oil, passes into a ruby-colored liquor.

By all that we have just said, everyone can see that the acid changes into oil, the oil into coal, and the coal into salt and ashes; that the more one melts a salt or an alkali, the more earthly it becomes, and the more it deposits in its calcination, solution and filtration, a very pure, sulphurous virgin earth. This earth is very suitable for fixing the previously separated principles, and for reducing them with it to a stone of the nature of glass, and yet of easy solution. This is the perfect quintessence, or the perfect magisterium. Any saline ash could be quickly reduced to a very fine earth, white as snow, by throwing it into a molten alkali. In this way, an Artist would not need to evaporate the salts by a long and tedious melting, and he could, in one go,obtain enough material to fix his work; but this operation is not necessary, for the carbon is sufficient to fix, by degrees, all the volatile parts of a subject.

As this thing is found universally and particularly in all the individuals of the whole world, let it be proved to me that there is no faeces in all the universe; Show them to me, and I'll admit defeat. Because if someone maintained that a land is such, I would immediately send him back to vitrification. Glass sufficiently proves that it preserves, above all things, the glory of perpetual constancy. But we must be careful that we cannot, without salt, reduce any earth to glass, whatever it may be. It must already contain a salt born with it, or one must be added to it externally. If the earth contains salt, it becomes fusible, and the more it fluent in the fire, the more superfluous moisture evaporates.The glass retains no more than it needs to take on a form of glass,

From this an Artist can derive great instruction. If he does not know how to reduce his saline tincture to glass, let him add a subtle earth prepared in its proportioned weight; let him melt them together in a well-closed and sealed crucible, in a glass furnace, for a few days and a few nights: they will flow together and acquire a fusible body of glass. But he must take care to take, for an animal tincture, a prepared animal earth; for a vegetable dye, a vegetable earth; and for a mineral tincture, a homogeneous earth, such that the metallic bodies furnish enough of it, after the sulfur is separated from it; for when it is taken from it, in whole or in greater part, the body becomes an electra or a metallic glass.

It is thus seen that animals and vegetables can be made a very fixed tincture in themselves, as well as of all minerals, and that although these are not so fixed as these and are more subject to corruption, they can nevertheless, by the skill of the Artist, be brought to the same degree of fixity and show that they contain in their center incorruptibility, as well as minerals.

Which again proves the truth of what I have said above, in several places of this treatise; namely that animals, plants and minerals are different only because of their subtlety or density, their humidity or dryness, their greater or lesser solution or coagulation; but that with regard to their origin and their essence, they are the same thing; that animals are volatile or extended vegetables, and that, on the contrary, minerals are fixed or concentrated vegetables, and vegetables fixed animals.

I believe I have sufficiently proved that there are no faeces in Nature, and that, consequently, I did not have to separate any in the operation of the quintessence of chaotic water.

If I interrupt the coagulation and pull the body from the alembic, if I grind it, moisten it and reverberate it; if I let the fire go out; if I crush the body again, etc., I am still in that Nature, and thereby shorten my work; for what Nature dries up and reverberates by the heat of the sun and by the central heat, she moistens and soaks again by the coolness of the moon and of the night, or by the rain; then it dries it up, coagulates it, and radiates it again, from above, by the heat of the sun; from below, by that of the centre; and so continues alternately and unceasingly.

Let an Artist take good care that Nature does not have all these vicissitudes in vain and that he also imitates her in this point. There is no advantage in making very long circuits when, by shorter paths, one can reach the goal more quickly. I know that the Philosophers say that their work is done in a single vase. I have only one alembic either, and sometimes I use a retort to shorten and bring up the more fixed parts; because they don't easily climb that high.

Besides, if someone does not approve of my method, let him follow whatever seems good to him; but nevertheless I advise him to also try mine: he will see that he will be the one which will succeed him best. I have agreed that my practice with chaotic water is long and boring, and I have promised to teach some other shorter and more pleasant ways. I will fulfill my promise and list three. The first is following the Art; the second following Nature itself, and the third following the Artists in favor of the separation of faeces. That each Artist chooses the one that will please him the most, he is the master of it.

FIRST WAY

Without separation of faces

Take putrefied rainwater: stir it: shake it well, and put it in an alembic: distill the subtle spirits out of it; and you will have the volatile. Reserve it separately: then distill: and you will have a coarse phlegm. Continue the distillation until a fairly moist liquor: keep this distilled phlegm apart. It is unnecessary for this operation to purify and sweeten all kinds of salts.Draw the remaining liquor from the alembic: put it in a retorte, and distill again, with ashes or sand, the phlegm, the acid or the oil: the coal or the dead head will remain at the bottom of the retorte: draw it and pulverize it, and put all the oil in it while grinding: put it in a high alembic: digest four or five days in a bain-marie: distill all that can pass: then add his volatile spirit above, which you reserved:digest them together in a bain-marie, of the first degree, two days and two nights: distill slowly and by degrees what can pass: and when nothing can pass any longer, put it in the ashes, coagulate and reverberate by the second or third degree of the fire of ashes, until the matter at the bottom takes on a color: then draw it from the alembic: pulverize it, and pour into it the liquor which you will have distilled from it in the bain-marie and the ashes: put - it in a water bath for two days and two nights: then distill everything that can pass, and pour it back as before, to make later imbibitions. When everything is distilled in a bain-marie, put it in the ashes and distill all the rest of the humidity, until dryness: slowly, however, and by degrees, so as not to awaken more fixed minds.When everything is dry, reverberate it again, as before: then withdraw it: grind, imbibe, digest, distill, coagulate, reverberate, and iterate until all matter has a uniform color: fix it by all degrees of ashes and sand, as I amply taught in the first part; and you will have a quintessence and a magisterium of the macrocosm, which is as good as the one that follows.

SECOND WAY

Way of nature itself

Take putrefied rainwater: distil from it, in a copper alembic, all the moisture until a thick liquor which you will put back in another alembic with its container and its capital: still distil in a bain-marie all that can pass; there will remain at the bottom only the earth which you will put in the ashes in an alembic with its capital and its container: dry it gently, by degrees, so as not to burn it, and so as not to awaken its vinegar or its oil; but distil only its superfluous humidity, and if you notice that some sour vapors pass through the spout of the capital, you must immediately let the fire go out; for then it is his vinegar which rises; what should not be; and this would first be followed by its oil,which would be a violent operation and would not conform to Nature, which proceeds gently and slowly in everything, until it turns water into a stone; for it does not naturally, easily, or very seldom, make coal out of anything; because it burns none: and never does it, as is done by Art, except by thunder, when it burns the trees: and in this there is neither generation nor natural corruption, but a violent destruction which the superior Vulcan does.

After you have gently distilled, to the ashes, all the humidity, reverberate the earth gently, by the second degree: then remove it, and pour over its phlegm, as much as it is necessary to reduce it in thickness of melted honey: put the mixture to dissolve in the bain-marie: then distill the said bath, and after that to the ashes: repeat these reverberations, exsiccations, imbibitions, digestions, distillations, coagulations, until that the earth be of one and the same color in all its parts; for from the brown color it will always advance towards the red color, and when it has passed several times through these colors, reverberate it strongly, and fix it to the ashes, then to the sand, as we have said above, and you will have a quintessence.

THIRD WAY

Or very short way for the separation of faeces

Take putrefied rainwater: distill the spirituous volatile part of it through the alembic: put it aside, and mark it A. Then distil the phlegmatic part to a thickness of melted honey: keep it also apart, and mark it with a B. Take what remains of the honeyed thickness of the alembic, and put it in a sand retort: ​​first distil a ph coarse vegetable; then a vinegar; then by degrees the oil: at the bottom will remain the caput mortuum.

Separate the coarse phlegm and the vinegar from the oil, by decantation with a funnel, and mark them with a C. Reserve the oil separately, and mark it D. Put the phlegm and the acid in a low alembic, in a bain-marie, with its capital and container: distill; the phlegm will pass and the acid will remain at the bottom. Add this water to the one above marked B. In this way you will have all the separate parts. They now need to be rectified.

Rectify the volatile spirit, marked A, in a high curcurbite: make it as subtle as you like: you will have the volatile spirit A rectified then take the vinegar marked C, and distil gently through the retort to the ashes; whereby it will also be rectified. Oil marked D must be rectified as follows.

Draw the caput mortuum from the retorte: take two parts of it, and three parts of the oil D: grind them together: put the mixture in a retorte: distill with ashes and sand, and you will also have a rectified oil.

Then take the caput mortuum and calcine it over an open flame, until it is reduced to ashes, and wash them with their phlegm B: filter, coagulate; and you will have a brown salt: redden this salt in the fire: dissolve it again in its phlegm: filter and coagulate again, and continue to redden it in the fire, to dissolve it, to filter, to coagulate, until it becomes white as snow; in this way you will have all the parts rectified.

conjunction

Take salt, two parts: vinegar, three parts: of the volatile spirit, six parts: pour the volatile spirit on its salt, in an alembic: then add the vinegar to it: adapt the container and the capital to it, and distill in a bain-marie until oleous: put the oil in the cellar; it will form very beautiful and very subtle crystals: take these crystals out of them: dry them: distill the liquid again in a water bath, half or until oleosity: make crystallize again, and repeat until no more crystals are formed there. Then take all these crystals; dry them gently in the sun or in the heat of a stove, and you will have the quintessence of the macrocosm or the great world: use them as you see fit.

If you want to make a stone out of it, take these desiccated crystals; put them in powder, and lock them in a matrass, after you have pulverized them: put them in the sand, and give, for three hours, the fire by degrees: they will melt like butter, or wax, in a solid stone, without giving any smoke.

If in this stone you want to coagulate its oil D and fix it, take three parts of this stone, and two parts of the oil: grind them well together in a glass dish: put them in a matrass, in a small heat of ashes, by degrees, for four days and four nights; and the oil will become fixed: add another two parts of oil to it, fix again and repeat this until all the oil is fixed there: then give the fire again by degrees, until all melt together into stone, and your work will be finished.

This last way will surely be to the liking of the greatest number of Artists, because of the separation of the faeces; but several objections will not fail to be made against the two others, which it is appropriate to forestall, by explaining some of my operations. I will therefore say, with regard to the first way, that the reason why I did not dephlegm or rectify it is that I like brevity, knowing that the more fixed earth, such as coal, does not retain phlegm, but only its essential parts; and as they are all homogeneous, there remains to me no doubt that there can be anything heterogeneous. I also know that whether I make the imbibition little by little or pour it all at once, the earth cannot retain more than it needs,and that she willingly allows the superfluous to be detached from herself. Finally the reason why I don't reduce the coal to ashes is that it contains the embryonic essential sulfur and that I don't want to lose it, any more than the other parts.

With regard to the second way, I will be asked where Nature operates, as I do here. I answer that it is everywhere. Does not Nature resolve things by their putrefaction? This is clearly seen in plants, when a plant dried up and moistened with rain water finally becomes mucus, rot and mud, as the Pagans and Gardeners constantly experience, with the great heaps of manure they make of fir branches and other trees which, being moistened by rain, in the forests, finally become black and greasy earth or mud (this is what natural calcination consists of). In this earth or in this mud, there remains hidden an essential nitrous salt, a fat or an oil which, by closed calcination, is burned into charcoal; but in an open fire,

As Nature, mainly on the surface of the earth, never undertakes such a violent calcination, but only a reverberation by the heat of the sun, she does not burn the essential salt, she only reverberates it to make it eager to attract to itself a humidity, that is to say the rain and the dew, from which the vegetable derives its growth. If, however, it is continually soaked, as the Artists practice in their vessels where they soak it and extract the moisture from it by distillation; vegetable growth is impeded and descends into a mineral nature; that is to say, by the continual imbibitions, abstractions and reverberations, it becomes ever more fixed, more earthly and more stony, and this is what we ask.

But we ask, for our medicine, a stony saline nature, a balsamic salinity, which alone can restore our bodies, by its fixity and igneity, and preserve it from corruption. So I was right to say that the second path is that of Nature herself. Let the Artist who wishes to follow this path take it as a model; he cannot go astray.

CHAPTER VI

Conclusions that can be drawn from the previous chapter.

I treated, in the preceding chapter, of the destruction, the separation and the regeneration of all natural things in general, and in particular of the regenerated chaotic water, from which all is born and takes its increase, so that the Artists have, in the work of this universal water, a model for all species and all individuals. Thus, as I first made the separation of chaotic water, it is necessary to separate in the same way the fixed parts and the volatile parts of each animal, vegetable or mineral individual. You then have to reunite them in the same order as they were separated, and make them a quintessence.

Nature itself indicates to us all the operations that we must perform, which are putrefaction or solution, distillation or rectification, conjunction, coagulation, fixation, imbibition, inceration, increase, fermentation and application. Nature traverses all these same degrees, as we have explained in several places of this second part and of the first.

When the Artist separates, he must always regard the volatile parts as the highest, that is to say as the sky and the air, the faeces as the water and the earth; and he must distinguish them according to the terms of Chemistry, into volatile, acid and alkali, into mercury, sulfur and salt; into soul, spirit and body, or divide them into four elements, like the Aristotelians, into fire, air, water and earth; whatever names he gives to these principles, provided that he does not confuse them and that he brings them together in the proper order for coagulation; for otherwise, the opposite effect would occur.When he has separated his subject into four parts or into three by distillation, he can undertake by rectification a more subtle preparation and further separate each of them into their degrees, as I taught in the previous chapter, with rainwater, that is to say in subtle, more subtle and very subtle. He will then be able to proceed to conjunction, coagulation and fixation, which do not require nearly as much time as putrefaction and solution or separation; for, if once he understands their usefulness, he will be able to shorten the work, by his own speculations, more than I could describe to him.

He must always regard the volatile parts as a volatile seed, and the vinegar or the acid, as a medium or as a semi-fixed and semi-volatile seed, or as the nitrous part, in the universals; and in species, as dissolved nitrous essential salt. It is the same with oil; for the oil is a coagulated and concentrated acid, and the acid is a resolved oil. As for coal, he must regard it as the most fixed part and as an earthly and coagulated oil: and if it is changed into ashes or into alkali salt, he must regard it as a precipitated, alkalized and fixed salt; for coal can be reduced, by a violent and prompt calcining fire, to constant ashes in the fire.

If the oil and the charcoal are ground together, and the moisture is distilled in a high curcurbite over an ash fire, the oil is changed into charcoal. If the fire is strongly pressed, the oil is changed into an acid liquor by distillation; and if we put the coal in an open fire, it changes, with a decrease in its quantity, into ashes and salt. It is necessary that an Artist knows these principles before all things; for if he works without knowing what the volatile is, acid or coal, ashes or alkali, he will operate without rule or measure.

We can therefore understand, from the preceding chapter, the general aim of all separation, coagulation and fixation. Let the reader meditate for a long time before putting his hand to work, and let him imprint well on his mind the process on rainwater, as his model. I give him this advice, so that if he makes mistakes and does not succeed, he does not have to impute them to me. Before moving on to the analysis and the quintessence of each kingdom, I will add a few more important preliminaries.

Each thing carries with it the principle of its dissolution and its coagulation. This principle is the spirit that is implanted there, which, as we have already said, needs water to be put into action. Where there is no water, there is no putrefaction, and consequently no separation in our Art to be able to separate the subtle from the thick. That is why, when we want to analyze any subject;if it does not contain enough moisture to destroy and putrefy it, we have recourse to regenerated chaotic water, which sympathizes with all the things of this world, as being their mother, and by this means we awaken the coagulated and slumbering spirit, so that after having suffered the torment of putrefaction and separation, the subject may attain, by coagulation and fixation, the immortal glory of the quintessence.

As regenerated chaotic water, or rainwater, is at first volatile, and then becomes semi-fixed and fixed, that is, nitre and salt, we must take it in its state of volatility to aid the dissolution and putrefaction of volatile matters, such as animals and vegetables; because it is in this state that it is homogeneous with them: but the stones, the metals, the minerals do not allow themselves to be tamed by this volatile water. We must take nitre and salt, and reduce them to the same Nature from which the minerals originated; then the gates of hell are broken, and the inhabitants are loosed.

In the first part, in treating of the generation of minerals, I said that they arise from a resolute acid, saline and spirituous, that is to say, nitre and salt, which, in the bowels of the earth, become sour by a strong fermentation and rise, by the central heat, in the form of spirit and spirituous vapor, to the viscera of the mountains, and there procreate all kinds of minerals. Niter and salt spirits are therefore homogeneous with all minerals. By their means the minerals are compelled to retrograde; and their own acidic, mineral coagulated and desiccated moisture is awakened to act and to destroy their own body.Thereby they become what they were at the beginning of their coagulation, that is to say, a specified mineral spirit salt, a metallic mineral saline spirit, or a vitriol: this, by retrogradation becomes a spirit, and this spirit by regeneration a glorified, penetrating, medicinal and balsamic body, each according to its kind . When they have once been pushed so far, only then can they be exalted by the volatile universal seed, or the chaotic water, or by the animals and plants, to a greater and more pleasant spiritualization; and one can make them fixed or volatile, vegetable or animal, or even universal, as one wishes; for each creature must necessarily allow itself to be changed into all the others, since they are born of the same matter.only then can they be exalted by the volatile universal seed, or chaotic water, or else by animals and plants, to a greater and more pleasant spiritualization; and one can make them fixed or volatile, vegetable or animal, or even universal, as one wishes; for each creature must necessarily allow itself to be changed into all the others, since they are born of the same matter. only then can they be exalted by the volatile universal seed, or chaotic water, or else by animals and plants, to a greater and more pleasant spiritualization; and one can make them fixed or volatile, vegetable or animal, or even universal, as one wishes; for each creature must necessarily allow itself to be changed into all the others, since they are born of the same matter.

After this preamble, we will undertake the analysis of the animals and we will seek there the quintessence.

CHAPTER VII

animal analysis

Without putrefaction one would not know, in the animal kingdom nor in the vegetable, to extract by separation or by distillation, but a weak water which retains only the odor of the vegetable or the animal from which it was drawn. All their forces, on the contrary, develop when putrefaction is preceded. We can then draw from the animal kingdom its volatile urinary salt, and from the vegetable kingdom its volatile fiery spirit.

We must therefore begin the analysis of any subject whatsoever, animal or vegetable, with putrefaction; we will then make distillation, rectification, conjunction, coagulation, copulation and fixation. It is by these degrees of preparation, marked by Nature herself, that we shall exalt the subject to the perfection of the quintessence. But as one can take, to make a medicine, each of the individuals of this vast universe, as well as a universal subject, so one makes one, not only of the whole body of an individual, but also of each separate part like blood, urine, dung, bones, skin, hair, horns. We will teach how to analyze all these parts jointly or separately, then join them and make them quintessential. We will start with liquids,

The analysis of the animal kingdom is the most disgusting, because of the stench it exhales in its putrefaction; but its virtue to operate is so much the stronger and more prompt, because of its penetrating and volatile salt. I advise a chemist, however, not to work with blood, especially if it is still hot and fresh from the animal; because it happened to me that while wanting to distil the more fixed parts by the retort, it appeared to me in the recipient, as well with the human blood as with that of the animals, the monstrous figure, or the spirit representing the animal on which I worked, and the human blood made, in the retort, a noise as if there were a ghost, which is very frightening; however, this does not always happen.If you putrefy the blood and the flesh, they give an unbearable stench. It is much better to take excrement if it can be had, such as urine and droppings, which are all the best and contain all the strength of the animal; after that nails, hair, scales, etc. However, we will not omit any part, so that the Artists have nothing to be desired.

Take, from an animal, the juice or the urine and all that is liquid; one of these things alone, or all together; for, although one is more volatile or more fixed than the other, they are of the same nature, since they come from the same subject. Put them in a vase that you will cover and place in a warm or somewhat hot place, so that they putrefy there. If you want to avoid the stench, you can put them in an alembic, with its capital and container, well sealed, which you will put in a bain-marie, at the first degree: leave them there at least fourteen days and fourteen nights: then distill in a bain-marie, by degrees, all that can pass, and preserve it.

If you want to rectify it, you can do so. Separate the phlegm from it, you will have a spirit and a very penetrating urinary volatile salt. The acid does not rise in the bain-marie through the alembic: this is why put the remaining matter in a retort of sand, and distill again by slow degrees; it will initially pass a phlegm; this will be followed by a very pungent liquor on the tongue, which is animal acid: after this, a thick oil will rise; and at the end there will remain at the bottom a matter burnt into carbon, which is the alkaline part.

So you have separated the volatile, the acid, the oil and the alkaline carbon. It is these things which form the intrinsic substance of the animal, and which are the parts of which it is composed. If you want to reduce it again to one, you must still pay attention to the axiom of the Philosophers, which says: Non transire posse de uno extremo ad alterum, absque medio.

Volatile spirit and coal are the two extremes, and they will never unite together without their middle nature; and their middle nature is water or phlegm, acid and oil; and these again will not unite if they are put there in an inverted order; or they will unite so slowly that the pain and the work will bore you. They must be joined in the same order as they were separated; then they will unite very easily and will quickly coagulate together, by a suitable degree of fire.

If you rectify these parts, you will make them, in truth, more subtle, but not better, nor of an easier conjunction. So do you want to work quickly? Take the volatile with its phlegm, or separate the phlegm from it, if you like: pour it over the acid, or azoth, and the two will be conjoined. Then take the oil: grind it with charcoal or with the dead head: put them in an alembic, and pour over the vinegar and the volatile oil: let them digest gently together, in a bain-marie, two days and two nights; and then distill by slow degrees; the volatile spirit will rise very weak with the phlegm, and the greater part of the volatile and the acid will remain at the bottom.Remove them from the bain-marie: put them in the ashes: coagulate and reverberate, as it is said in the fifth chapter. When you have reverberated them, soak them again with their distilled volatile: make them digest again in a bain-marie: distill, coagulate and dry in ashes, and then fix, in the same way as we have taught, with rainwater; for things must be done here in the same order: then the quintessence will be perfect.

Someone may ask me why I say: leave the phlegm with the volatile, or separate it.

If it is good for nothing, why leave it: if it is useful, why separate it?

I answer that it is immaterial to leave the phlegm with the volatile, or to separate it from it by rectification; because even though it remains there, the essential fixative part nevertheless does not take it into itself; she always allows it to be detached by distillation; but we must not conclude from this that phlegm is good for nothing. Take good care, as I said above, that he is an unripe and not saline seed; that therefore he is a vehicle and an instrument of the universal spirit, both active and passive, by means of which this coagulated and dormant spirit forges all in a body, or has forged it, and changes it all, or has changed it; for as long as the phlegm is joined to it, it always excites the mind to operate and make continual changes.

To confirm this, take the quintessence of an animal on which all its volatile salt is coagulated and concentrated: put it in an alembic: pour on it its own phlegm, and fill the alembic with it to the top: put it in a warm place and (take care) you will see an admirable play there; for the spirit will represent the figure of the animal such as it was when it was still alive; if you put this phlegm in the cold, it will dissipate immediately.

We must not therefore despise phlegm; for it is filled and permeated throughout with the spirit and spirituous force of its subject, as are all the distilled waters of the Apothecaries. When I take the quintessence internally, I prefer this phlegm, which has been separated from it, to any other vehicle. This phlegm is also very good for putting a new subject into putrefaction; instead of using other foreign species like rainwater, fountain water, or leaven, etc., although however the fountain or rainwater are equally homogeneous. That's enough for the liquid parts of animals. Now we will operate on the dry and dry parts.

Take flesh, bones, horns, hair, nails, skin; in a word, the solid parts of an animal, all together or only one of them: reduce them to as small particles as you can: put them in an alembic, and pour into them blood or urine, or rotten juices of the same animal, and in the absence of these liquid parts, rotten rainwater, or else urine of the microcosm, that is to say, of man, who is the center of the whole animal kingdom, and in which all the virtues of other animals are united, as in wine are united all the virtues of other vegetables, and in gold and in its vitriolic guhr all mineral virtues: pour, I say, one of these things over your subject reduced to small parts: put it in a bain-marie, or steam or horse manure: putrefy it:

As the hairs of an animal are of a nature almost all greasy and coagulated and an oleaginous fat, as most of the oleaginous things being balsamic, and enter very with difficulty and very slowly into putrefaction, like the bones and the horns, an Amateur might be afraid to undertake such tedious operations. But I will teach him two more manipulations by which he can quickly reach his goal.

After you have cut, grated, and filed hairs, bones, horns, nails, etc., cook them with the clean urine of the animal from which you have taken them, or with human urine, or with rotten rainwater, or with salt water, until they are reduced to jelly: which is done in two or three times twenty-four hours more or less, according as their coagulation is hard or soft. . Add to this jelly a sufficient quantity of rainwater or rotten urine, so that it has only the consistency of clear, melted honey; it will not take long to putrefy. When it smells very bad, it must be separated and combined, as we have noted above, that is to say, the volatile parts must be distilled by the alembic, and the more fixed parts by the retort, with sand and ashes,

The second manipulation does not give as much substance as by putrefaction. However, it does not fail to be satisfactory. Take the horns, the bones, the hair and the skin: reduce them in very small parts: put them in a retort with its container, and distil slowly, by degrees, what wants to pass: when you have made the separation of their principles, join them in the same order as they were separated: by this means you will not find any volatile, but only a coarse phlegm, an acid and an oil, and carbon; for in parts so hard and so dry, part of the volatile has flown away, and the other part has been transmuted into acid or into animal vinegar.

This is what the separation and conjunction of the Art consists of, without separations of faeces, in which all the parts, except the recolated water or the phlegm, have been concentrated and fixed. I must warn the reader here that if I often repeat the same thing, he must not imagine that it is superfluous. I do it so that, by each word in particular, he has the opportunity to penetrate further into Nature. Many will say that I always want to follow Nature, and that, however, I indicate several violent paths which are contrary to her. But I always add to it the way of Nature, which destroys nothing, or very rarely, to the point of burning it and reducing it to coal: now, an Artist must consider the goal of Nature and of Art.Nature does not seek to destroy a vegetable or animal body to the last point: because it is enough for her to resolve it into an essential mucilaginous juice, not yet having the power to make a quintessential body, of glorified consistency and which is incorruptible in itself, as Art can do, and as are all glass bodies which are even more durable than gold and silver. For we will never hear, or very rarely, that the glass and the precious stones have become corrupted, unless the Artist has destroyed them on purpose, and has reduced them to their first material. and as are all glass bodies which are even more durable than gold and silver.For we will never hear, or very rarely, that the glass and the precious stones have become corrupted, unless the Artist has destroyed them on purpose, and has reduced them to their first material. and as are all glass bodies which are even more durable than gold and silver. For we will never hear, or very rarely, that the glass and the precious stones have become corrupted, unless the Artist has destroyed them on purpose, and has reduced them to their first material.

But by natural means, this will not happen easily; one sees, on the contrary, in the mines, that the gold and the silver have been awakened and destroyed by the arsenical vapours, to the point of leaving behind them only a sterile flower, and a stone in the form of an electra.

I will still teach here two paths, one of which is that of Nature itself, and the other that of Art, by which each can enlighten himself and choose the one that pleases him best. Nature operates as follows. It softens dead animals and tender plants, by dew and rain, or by other waters and humidity, and makes them fall into putrefaction. Then it distills the volatile parts one after the other, in the air, by the heat of the sun and by the central heat; but it cannot raise, by this feeble heat, acid, oil, &c. The residues are called today, in ordinary apothecaries, essential or vegetable salt; and I call them an animal or vegetable vitriol, since it is candid in the same way, and it contains an earth which can be precipitated.This salt or this vitriol gives, in the distillation, a slightly acid spirit, whose sourness is of a mineral taste, that is to say of a vitriolic acidity which is followed by a thick oil: then comes the charcoal. Nature does not separate these three things in the vegetable and animal kingdom; and in the mineral kingdom. It fixes them even more and concentrates them; whereby they become ever more biting and more corrosive, as can be seen with spirit and oil of vitriol.

After Nature has thus reduced animals and vegetables to essential salt or vitriol, she always and continually imbibes it with the volatile parts, that is to say with rain, dew, etc. The Artist can do a similar operation, making animals a substance of essential salt, or a jelly; and then distilling them with the volatile spirit of the same animal, imbibing it with this spirit, coagulating it and fixing it, by reiteration, in quintessence. If he had no volatile of this animal, he would only have to take the volatile spirit of human urine, or that of rainwater, dew, etc. When Nature often soaks the essential salt, it grows in height, in the air, and it makes a plant or a tree of it, instead of the Artist making its quintessence; to which Nature does not yet tend.

Take an animal (the same must be understood of vegetables), reduce it to jelly, by its own urine, by that of man or by putrefied rainwater: let them ferment and putrefy together: then pour out what is clear; filter it, and distil all the volatile in a bain-marie, down to the third part or until the oil: set apart the volatile: draw out the oil or liquor that remains, and put it in the cellar to crystallize or thicken like jelly; this is the essential animal salt, or animal vitriol. Then take these crystals or this jelly, and put them on a gentle fire of ashes, to dry them up and coagulate them, without however burning them into charcoal: it is here where Nature ends and where Art begins.Leave to cool and pour over its volatile until it floats two or three, or at the most, four fingers: digest again in a bain-marie: distill and let rise what you want to pass in a bain-marie; let nothing burn to coal or ashes; and when it does not want to pass anything in a bain-marie, put it back in the ashes: coagulate until dryness, and reverberate it a little strongly: then remove it: reduce it to powder, and soak it again with its volatile. Distill again in a water bath: coagulate over the ash fire, and repeat these imbibitions, coagulations, reverberations and fixations, until it has passed through all the colors, as we have said above; and you will have the quintessence of it. distill and let rise what you want to pass through a bain-marie;let nothing burn to coal or ashes; and when it does not want to pass anything in a bain-marie, put it back in the ashes: coagulate until dryness, and reverberate it a little strongly: then remove it: reduce it to powder, and soak it again with its volatile. Distill again in a water bath: coagulate over the ash fire, and repeat these imbibitions, coagulations, reverberations and fixations, until it has passed through all the colors, as we have said above; and you will have the quintessence of it. distill and let rise what you want to pass through a bain-marie; let nothing burn to coal or ashes;and when it does not want to pass anything in a bain-marie, put it back in the ashes: coagulate until dryness, and reverberate it a little strongly: then remove it: reduce it to powder, and soak it again with its volatile. Distill again in a water bath: coagulate over the ash fire, and repeat these imbibitions, coagulations, reverberations and fixations, until it has passed through all the colors, as we have said above; and you will have the quintessence of it. and imbibe it again with its volatile. Distill again in a water bath: coagulate over the ash fire, and repeat these imbibitions, coagulations, reverberations and fixations, until it has passed through all the colors, as we have said above; and you will have the quintessence of it.and imbibe it again with its volatile. Distill again in a water bath: coagulate over the ash fire, and repeat these imbibitions, coagulations, reverberations and fixations, until it has passed through all the colors, as we have said above; and you will have the quintessence of it.

In this way the volatile is fixed, as it should be; and in the end there will rise only an insipid phlegm which has left behind all the concentrated essential parts, which are only a fixed animal nature, since they resist all fire. This is the simplest way and the most conformable to that of Nature. The second way is of the utmost purity, and suffers no faeces (as the chymists imagine them to be); but it is a purified quintessence. There she is.

After you have separated the volatile, acid and oleaginous parts of an animal or vegetable, rectify and separate the volatile and acid from all phlegm, as best you can, and as almost all authors teach; then take the oil, grind it well with two parts of charcoal and distil it in the same way through the retort to ashes and sand; or, if you don't care about oiliness, grind the oil with its coal: put them on a fagot, in a baker's or pastry cook's oven, the time it is heated so that the flames, which reverberate from above on the coal and on the oil, reduce them to ashes or salt. However, care must be taken to put the bundle in a place where no wood or coal can fall into it, and where the flame can play and reverberate.After they are reduced to ashes, wash them with their own phlegm: filter and coagulate; you will have the alkali salt; put it again on a bundle, and make it reverberate and redden again in the same oven; then dissolve it again in its phlegm or in rainwater: distill, filter, coagulate; reiterate these reverberations, ignitions, solutions, filtrations and coagulations, until the salt is very beautiful, clear and white. In this way the three parts, that is to say the volatile, the acid and the alkali, will be purified at best; after that you have to do the conjunction. distill, filter, coagulate; reiterate these reverberations, ignitions, solutions, filtrations and coagulations, until the salt is very beautiful, clear and white.In this way the three parts, that is to say the volatile, the acid and the alkali, will be purified at best; after that you have to do the conjunction. distill, filter, coagulate; reiterate these reverberations, ignitions, solutions, filtrations and coagulations, until the salt is very beautiful, clear and white. In this way the three parts, that is to say the volatile, the acid and the alkali, will be purified at best; after that you have to do the conjunction.

Most Artists have the habit of reverberating under the muffle with the coal fire; but I recommend the reverberation to the fire of flame, which penetrates much more strongly and more quickly than that of coal; because the flame contains within it a very pure, very clear, and very penetrating volatile; whereas carbon contains within itself a very strong and corrosive acid. Everyone is however free to use which of these two he wants: for me I consider the best flame fire, because I have learned it by experience.

conjunction

Take rectified alkali, two parts; put in an alembic: pour over it four parts of its volatile: then add to it three parts of its acid; they will unite and fix instantly, and they will even constantly flow together in the fire, like incombustible oil; and in the air they will set like ice. All you have to do is put them with the capital and the container in a bain-marie, and extract the phlegm from it until it reaches oiliness. Put this phlegm in the cold; the quintessence will coagulate into crystals. Take them out and extract the phlegm or moisture from them again until they become oily, or evaporate them until they are filmy: make them crystallize again: continue this operation until no more crystals are formed there;then you will have the quintessence. Let it dry gently: put it in a small matrass with sand: give fire by four degrees; it will melt into stone; what you can see by inserting a candle through the end of the stove; for it will remain as oil; and when the fire is extinguished, it will be stoned. Then break the matrass: draw the quintessence from it, and enclose it in a box of boxwood, in which you can carry it dry all over the earth. When you want to use it, take some grains and bring from the first apothecary a suitable water, or put it in wine; it will melt there, like sugar or ice; swallow it and consider its virtues.Then break the matrass: draw the quintessence from it, and enclose it in a box of boxwood, in which you can carry it dry all over the earth. When you want to use it, take some grains and bring from the first apothecary a suitable water, or put it in wine; it will melt there, like sugar or ice; swallow it and consider its virtues. Then break the matrass: draw the quintessence from it, and enclose it in a box of boxwood, in which you can carry it dry all over the earth. When you want to use it, take some grains and bring from the first apothecary a suitable water, or put it in wine; it will melt there, like sugar or ice; swallow it and consider its virtues.

Although you have separated with extreme care the phlegm or recolated water from all the parts, there will nevertheless be found in its coagulation more phlegm than quintessence. You will also see in this operation with what speed the homogeneous parts unite together, coagulate, embrace each other, and that they hold together so strongly that they will rather pierce the crucible or the glass from the bottom than separate from each other, so quickly do they fix themselves. And even when, by addition, one would make them pass volatile through the retort, they always participate in the qualities of one another, and one cannot distinguish them.

I taught an Artist all sorts of practices and methods, to concentrate the whole substance of everything (except only recolated water or phlegm), to reduce it to a dry, fixed and fusible form. He can carry it with him all over the world. A single grain operates more powerfully than many pints of ordinary distilled water.

But you may ask me why I burn the oil, which however is an essential part. I did it on purpose, in order to speed up my operation, and so that an Artist would know that the Art reduces oil to salt, and that salt or alkali is a fixed spilled oil; which is also seen by its tincture, when one pours on it its acid and its volatile; since it then takes on either a ruby ​​redness, or a yellow color like gold, or some other tint of different colors. But if you want to keep the oil and take only the fixed coal reduced to ashes, you can do it: and when the quintessence is melted in stone, you can then add the oil to it, mix it with the stone, then pour over the phlegm which has been distilled from it, cook them together in a bain-marie,distill them by slow degrees until dryness; then coagulate them and fix them in ashes and sand, and melt them into stone, as I have taught the method above, by dealing with rainwater.

Someone will still be able to complain and say: yes, this method would be good if it could be done in quantity; and it would be even better if the poor, as well as the rich, could use it and if the Apothecaries could give it away cheaply.

It is easy. Let an Apothecary take three baskets full of an herb such as, for example, melee: or let him take blood, urine or flesh from an animal: let him put them in a large alembic to putrefy: then take from the same animal the bones, horns, nails, hair, etc., and let him put, during the time that the liquid or soft parts putrefy, half of these dry parts s, reduced to very small parcels, in a retort, and that he distils the acid and the oil to coal. By this means, he will have plenty of acid, oil and coal.

Let him put the other half of the dry parts in a potter's furnace, over an open fire, in a pot; and that he then extracts from their ashes, by leaching, all the fixed salt that he can. Let him distil, from the liquid parts mentioned above, which were in putrefaction, a volatile in quantity. It can also calcine the residues, and extract the salt from them, by leaching; which further increases the amount of salt. After this operation, he will have the principles in quantity, and he will have nothing more to do than to join them and to coagulate them, to have a lot of quintessence, which he will be able to sell very cheaply.

I must, however, point out here that animals do not produce a lot of fixed salt, but a lot of earth devoid of salt. How will we manage to have fixed salt in quantity, in order to fix the volatile parts? It is necessary to resort to places where Nature itself manufactures a great deal of universal alkali. This universal alkali is homogeneous to all creatures. Do we not find entire mountains of salt? And isn't this common kitchen salt the best balm for all animals, and especially for man? It is very easy to specify it on each subject that one wishes to quintessentially, by taking the dry parts of the animal that one wishes to calcine in a potter's oven, and adding thereto, after they have been reduced to small parts, the fourth or third part of common salt.In this way the salt burns and becomes specific with them, and it becomes a specific animal alkali. Thus, an Artist will not have to complain that he cannot separate the quintessence in quantity from all things. An Apothecary could fill his shop with quintessences which, when he once had plenty, would not become rancid and spoil like his waters, oils, and ointments; and he could sell them at a very low price. For he did not sell them by pounds, by ounces, or by half ounces; but by grain and by scruples; because they would operate in small doses. He could make them in much less time than he uses to make his waters and oils, and he would derive as much profit from them and even more.an Artist will not have to complain that he cannot separate the quintessence in quantity from all things. An Apothecary could fill his shop with quintessences which, when he once had plenty, would not become rancid and spoil like his waters, oils, and ointments; and he could sell them at a very low price. For he did not sell them by pounds, by ounces, or by half ounces; but by grain and by scruples; because they would operate in small doses. He could make them in much less time than he uses to make his waters and oils, and he would derive as much profit from them and even more. an Artist will not have to complain that he cannot separate the quintessence in quantity from all things.An Apothecary could fill his shop with quintessences which, when he once had plenty, would not become rancid and spoil like his waters, oils, and ointments; and he could sell them at a very low price. For he did not sell them by pounds, by ounces, or by half ounces; but by grain and by scruples; because they would operate in small doses. He could make them in much less time than he uses to make his waters and oils, and he would derive as much profit from them and even more. when it once had many, would not become rancid and spoil like its waters, oils, and ointments; and he could sell them at a very low price. For he did not sell them by pounds, by ounces, or by half ounces; but by grain and by scruples;because they would operate in small doses. He could make them in much less time than he uses to make his waters and oils, and he would derive as much profit from them and even more. when it once had many, would not become rancid and spoil like its waters, oils, and ointments; and he could sell them at a very low price. For he did not sell them by pounds, by ounces, or by half ounces; but by grain and by scruples; because they would operate in small doses. He could make them in much less time than he uses to make his waters and oils, and he would derive as much profit from them and even more.

With herbs he will find it even easier, as we will teach in the next chapter. He will take a quantity of grass, such as three full baskets: he will ferment and putrefy one; and the other two he will dry out gently in the shade. When they are completely dry, he will burn one of them to ashes in a baker's or potter's oven. On the other, he will distill the vinegar and the oil; and from that which is putrefied he will distill the volatile; from the ashes he will draw salt, and after rectification he will join them together; and in this way he will have the quintessence in quantity.

Because, we have said, an Artist will see, if he pays attention to it, that Nature allows herself to be united and separated by environments, in a very beautiful order. It itself manifests these mediums, and places the vinegar between the volatile and the alkali. This vinegar can be found in all subjects; and without it, we cannot make any lasting conjunction. For it is neither fixed nor volatile; but a mean, true hermaphrodite, and a Janus who has sight forward and backward. If it is joined to the volatile, it is agreeable to it; it is similar to alkali. With the volatile, it becomes volatile; and with the fixed, it becomes fixed. No author has explained this point. It is a very great secret;and I hope that more than one Reader will thank me for having published it.

Having completed the analysis of the animals, we will turn, following the order, to the hermaphrodite kingdom of the vegetables, whose head touches the animal kingdom, and the root the mineral kingdom, to manifest their innermost parts, let us begin.

CHAPTER VIII

Plant analysis.

This kingdom, with regard to separation and coagulation, is similar to the animal kingdom; and it only differs a little in the quantity of its principles. For the animal kingdom has its fetid urinary salt; and the vegetable kingdom has its fiery fetid spirit, though many drinkers of brandy find it as agreeable as amber. The subjects of this kingdom also differ among themselves, like those of the animal kingdom. For there are soft and succulent subjects such as leaves, stems, roots, fruit, juice, gum, resin, oil, seed; and hard, dry subjects such as stems, roots, wood and seed. We will teach how to proceed with each other.

Take anything luscious and green: pound and mash as best you can. If by its own nature there was not enough juice, pour putrefied rainwater, wine, and salt water into it as much as needed to reduce it to the consistency of a clear broth; or, if you prefer, squeeze the juice out of it and let it ferment like wine, or like the cider and perry made by the Paisans; for every soft and succulent subject can be so treated; as well as the hard parts, when they are cut small and a sufficient quantity of humidity is added. If you want to leave the herbs together reduced to a broth, put them in a wooden vase in a warm place and let them macerate like this for about a fortnight or three weeks. until they smell a bit sour or rotten;then put them in an alembic and gently distil the volatile with its subtle phlegm: draw out the residues: dry them well: put them in a retort of sand, and distil by degrees; you will only then have a coarse phlegm, then a vinegar, after that the thick oil, and at the bottom there will remain a mass burned in charcoal.

In this way the plant will be separated. We must, however, take care that, as plants do not resemble each other, they also contain more or less different principles; for some contain much volatile, and others more vinegar, according as they have specified in them more of the universal seed, and have coagulated and fixed it. Their virtue and their strength are also distributed according to these principles, and they must be esteemed and applied in proportion.

A fragrant herb that has a lot of volatile has the strength to restore and heal the natural volatile or animal spirit, and even metal; though it does not always depend on the good smell outside, but much more on the inside, which, distilled by the archaeus, very speedily restores and heals the afflicted limbs. If an herb has a lot of acid, it is specified to heal stronger parts, such as muscles, tendons, bones, cartilages, etc.

It is the same with oil; the thicker the essential parts, the more they support the thicker and more coagulated parts of the body, or destroy them, depending on whether they are applied. Every doctor knows that a volatile thing can never feed on fixed bones, nor enter them; for when such a volatile substance enters the body, it is immediately pushed by the internal heat into all the limbs, and finally it leaves through the pores of the skin in the form of vapor or sweat. An acid does not dissipate so easily; it acts through the urine or the stools, or most often procures a coarse sweat. Do we not see that when an extremely melancholy person is made to breathe a good odor, he immediately feels relief and restoration in his afflicted heart,although, by this passing odor, this relief is not of long duration, especially if her affliction comes from some enormous crimes which she could have committed, or if she is tormented by the number of her debts or by an evil fortune She will however acknowledge that this odor was pleasant with her heart and her spirit. If, on the contrary, she is mischievously given to smell something bad, she will become sadder, more distressed, more ill and more angry at the moment. So too, a warm herb or animal spirit warms a melancholy cold; and a narcotic or innocuous cold spirit cools a bilious. or if she is tormented by the number of her debts or by a bad fortune She will however admit that this odor was agreeable to her heart and to her mind.If, on the contrary, she is mischievously given to smell something bad, she will become sadder, more distressed, more ill and more angry at the moment. So too, a warm herb or animal spirit warms a melancholy cold; and a narcotic or innocuous cold spirit cools a bilious. or if she is tormented by the number of her debts or by a bad fortune She will however admit that this odor was agreeable to her heart and to her mind. If, on the contrary, she is mischievously given to smell something bad, she will become sadder, more distressed, more ill and more angry at the moment. So too, a warm herb or animal spirit warms a melancholy cold; and a narcotic or innocuous cold spirit cools a bilious. a warm herb or animal spirit warms a melancholy chill;and a narcotic or innocuous cold spirit cools a bilious. a warm herb or animal spirit warms a melancholy chill; and a narcotic or innocuous cold spirit cools a bilious.

When the vegetable is thus separated, the conjunction takes place in the same order and in the same manner as we have taught, in treating of rainwater and the animal kingdom. We can operate in the same way on all things, following the ways, processes and methods that we have indicated above. To avoid prolixity, we will not repeat them here.

However, I still have to regale the Lovers of Chemistry with a manipulation. Many chemists have tormented themselves to find the volatile salt of a vegetable, without being able to succeed, although the thing is very easy. For if you let a herb macerate and putrefy until it forms worms, which will soon happen, when you see this sign, you have only to distill it in a high alembic, in a bain-marie; it will rise a urinating animal spirit, and the volatile salt will attach itself to the capital, which is an evident proof that the vegetable has become animal and that the animal kingdom is full of volatile salt. Let the Reader take note of this; he will find, by his speculations, many other things, which he would have tormented his mind long and uselessly to seek and find.

As regards harder vegetables such as grasses and ligneous roots, woods, etc., they are treated like the bony parts of animals; they are grated, limed, sawn, pounded and crushed in small parts, as best as possible: poured over rotten rainwater, wine, salt or nitrous water, and steeped or cooked until they become soft and as if cooked; then they are putrefied or else, after having been cut into small pieces, they are distilled in a retort, as we have taught about animals; and when they are separated, they are joined, as we have said. When the wood is distilled without having been putrefied, it gives no volatile matter, any more than animals, etc.

At the risk of boring the reader, I will tell him again that water from rain or snow, etc., is a homogeneous volatile with all individuals in the whole world, and that we can use it for all things that have none. Likewise, if he is working on a subject which does not have enough acid or alkali, he has only to take the saltpetre or his spirit; the alkali replaces it with salt and with its alkaline spirit. But if he thinks that the nitre or the salt is too strong or too corrosive, he has only to separate from the rainwater, by distillation, all its volatiles and its phlegm, and distill the residues; after the reverberation, it will find the alkali. In this way he will obtain everything he may need.

An Artist must note well that a universal subject is specified in all the individuals. For example, suppose I had no volatile, but only vinegar, oil and alkali; I have only to add the volatile of rainwater, like a universal; it will be specified with the other principles and will take the same quality and specification of the acid to which it has been added; for the axiom says: A potiori fit denominatio. Now acid, oil and alkali are in greater quantity; therefore they can easily tame the volatile, and transmute it into their nature.

Likewise, if in the nature of things there existed a purely volatile subject, and you did not find, in the same kingdom, a homogeneous vinegar or alkali to fix this volatile and concentrate it in a stone, you have only to turn to the universals, that is to say, to rain or snow water, or to nitre and salt; they will easily take the specification of the volatile to which you add them, and they will operate according to its quality and destination.

Everyone can see that the universal subjects, such as dew, rain, snow, etc., are hardly born than they become specific in the moment: that in falling they attach themselves to animal, vegetable and mineral creatures, and change into them. One has only to cook a vegetable, an animal or a mineral with saltpetre and salt, either in liquid or in dry form; we shall first see the nitre and the salt participate in their quality.

It is not, however, necessary to have recourse to universals; since God has given to each kingdom a principal subject, which contains in itself generally all the subjects or individuals of the same kingdom and whose principles can replace those which they lack, or take the place of their own volatile, acid and alkali. Such are, in the animal kingdom, the man and the woman, with all their parts, the urine, the droppings, the flesh, the skin, the bones, etc. In the vegetable kingdom, wine, bled, wheat. In the mineral kingdom, saltpetre and salt.

Someone may still have a little scruple in the separation of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, because, in the distillation of animals and vegetables, a subtle oil with a volatile spirit is passed through the water bath, through the alembic, and that I did not mention it.

But I said above that the more open and subtle something is, the more volatile it becomes. What is a fiery spirit, if not an extremely extended oil, or an extremely volatilized saltpeter, and resolved into a seed of fiery nitre? Have I not proved, to the point of boring, that the volatile and the fixed, the acid and the alkali are in no way distinct, on account of their essence, but only by accident, according as one or the other has been made more volatile or more fixed? It is in relation to these accidental forms that they are given a distinct denomination, and not relatively to their matter, on account of which they are all the same thing and universal.

We should have no qualifications about this. Even if the volatile oil should rise from the beginning, there is only to throw it again into the conjunction, on the fixed part, to rectify it by means of it and to coagulate it. Scruples of this nature have prevented more than one Artist from penetrating to the center; because they imagined that it must necessarily be a heterogeneous, or a part rejected by Nature itself. In this way they cast off the best and kept the sludge in their hand, as the brandy distillers do, who retain the spirit of wine and give the remaining parts, which are the best and in greater quantity, to eat to the pigs. But I tell you that whatever Nature has composed, poison or theriac, is good;for the Artist can always make poison a theriac; it is only a matter of maturing and fixing it.

Everyone knows that mineral, vegetable or animal poisons are, almost all, volatile, crude and immature, and that, when they are fixed, they are no longer poisons but an antidote and a preservative against the poison. Consequently, if Nature has begun something and has left it imperfect, it is necessary for man to perfect it, in order to have occasion to contemplate and admire the works of God which are so diverse and so marvelous, and to thank him for having given him the faculty of knowing them and of rising through them to their author. Let us finish this chapter there, and turn to the mineral kingdom, which is the principal object of the researches of the chymists.

CHAPTER IX

Mineral analysis.

This kingdom, according to external appearance, is quite different from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, although internally they are the same thing. All their difference consists only in that the minerals are fermented, digested, coagulated and fixed more strongly and for a longer time, and that having driven out of them, by a stronger degree of heat, the recolated water or the superfluous humidity, with the volatile seed and the volatile spirits, they are of a drier and more stony nature.

Vegetables and animals are born from the universal volatile seed, as I said above. By this same volatile seed, they are reduced and regenerated into their first matter; but the minerals took their origin from the more fixed parts of the universal sperm, that is to say, from saltpetre and salt, and especially from the corrosive spirituous vapors of these two, strongly fermented; in a word, of the spirit of nitre and that of salt, mixed together, which violently attack the earth changed into stone, corrode it, resolve it, and make of it a vitriolic or aluminous guhr.

Thus, as the minerals are born from the more fixed and more spirituous universal sperm, it is also necessary that, by the seed or by the spirit of nitre or salt, each one must be resolved and reduced, according to its degree, into an essential salt or vitriol, and this one into vapors or into a corrosive water, according to the axiom: Ex quo aliquid fit, in illud rursus resolvitur ; and per quod aliquid fit, per illud ipsum resolvi necesse est.

This kingdom also has, like the others, more or less fixed subjects, that is to say, a vitriol, an alum, a volatile and fixed sulphur, an arsenic, a marcasite and metallic stone, &c. For this reason, it is also necessary to conform the degree of resolution to the degree of fixation, and in order not to be mistaken there, it is necessary to take the subjects such as Nature gives them, and which have not yet been worked on by Art; for those who have passed through the hand of men are greatly altered by fire, by all sorts of additions, and by the diminution of the thing which is employed to make these subjects fall back to their first origin.

The fundamental rule of this analysis is that saltpetre or its spirits do not attack so strongly alkalized or fixed minerals as those which are still filled with acids; on the contrary, all acids abhor salt and its spirits. Here is the reason. If the acid is joined to an alkalized subject, either it kills itself there and does not attack it at all, or it fixes itself there instead of resolving it. In the same way, if we join an alkaline subject or menstruation to an acid, it is also killed there and does not attack it either, or is fixed there, instead of resolving it. On the contrary, like resolves like, that is to say, an acid resolves an acid, and an alkali resolves the other;but what Nature has conjoined and united together in a hermaphrodite way (that is to say where Nature has not yet worked enough, fixed, alkalized,

Now, I have said that the spirit of nitre and of salt are universal menses, or the most fixed seeds in the world, which unite not only with minerals, but also with fixed animals and vegetables. If we consider this point well and reflect on it, we will come nearer to the goal, to operate many things, otherwise very long and very tedious.

I have also said that when the specified, individuated spirit has no superfluous humidity of its own, in order to be reduced to its first matter, it must be awakened by the addition of the universal spirit, in order to be able to act on its own subject; above all the minerals which, almost all, are drier bodies and which have expelled from them in the greatest part of their superfluous moisture. Such and like dry bodies must (because they lack a sufficient quantity of their own moisture, or of the vitriolic or aluminous acid) be aided by the universal acid or alkali, by means of which the vitriolic or aluminous spirit, which is implanted therein, may be aroused and excited to act on its own body, and reduce it to its first matter.

All physicists know very well that, in mineral nature, we really find all kinds of juices, liquors and waters, which are suitable for solving various subjects, such as petroleum, naphtha, aluminous, saline and nitrous waters, vitriol water, sulphurous baths, etc. But as all these things, in their present state, are much too weak to attack a truly fixed metal or stone, and are still much less capable of reducing them to their first matter, we must pay attention to the true origin and principles of all metals and minerals, and how they are specified by various digestions, that is to say, how the universal sperm, which is the spirit of nitre and salt,

Thus, since the first matter of minerals is a vitriolic or aluminous acid, it must also be used by us as a principal means of making minerals and metals retrograde to their first principle, by first reducing them to a similar vitriolic and aluminous substance, which then, by further reduction, must become a corrosive mineral vapour.

Only then does it touch, with its root, the mineral nature, with its head, the vegetable nature, and it can be changed with the vegetables, and by the vegetables, into the vegetable, and finally by the animal into the animal, or else with the minerals and through the minerals, into mineral or into a regenerated metal. An Amateur will again see by this that Nature or Art always passes per media mediata homogenea , from one principle to another; what he must consider carefully.

Someone will be able to tell me: if you have no other menses to tell us than the spirit of nitre and salt, the spirit or oil of vitriol, sulfur and alum, it was not necessary to daub paper for that. Everyone knows them; and they have long since been abandoned, as being very pernicious corrosives.

I reply that they were abandoned only because they did not know how to make use of them. It is only a question, however, of causing the minerals to retrograde, in the same way as they have advanced in their formation, or of reducing the fixed to the volatile, by suitable media.

Consider then (I cannot repeat it too often) from what and how Nature spawns minerals. You will see that it fixes, through the earth, the corrosive spirituous vapors of nitre and salt; that it dries up their humidity and that, the more it dissipates, the more the minerals coagulate and become fixed; that thus, since they are arid and dry, they must be given a homogeneous and superabundant humidity, in order to awaken again the fixed sperm and spirits which are enclosed and bound there, and to reduce them to what they were in their origin, that is to say, to a vitriolic and aluminous guhr.

What shall I say to you now, to you who abhor the corrosive menses which I recommend and counsel? Are you looking for alkaest, and you want it to be mild and without any corrosives? You know, however, that it is called very sour vinegar, acetum acerrimum . You also know that the Philosophers, when they want to resolve some subject by alkaest, add spirit of wine to it; and you say yourself that it is because the spirit of wine sweetens corrosive. Reason therefore more consistently: learn how to apply corrosives, and know that in rejecting them, you reject the main key of any fortress.

In treating of the analysis of animals and vegetables, we have said that it is necessary to take, to solve them, their own juice, when they contained enough of it, or else, in its absence, chaotic water or putrefied rainwater. The same must be done with regard to minerals. When the mineral humidity is lacking, or when it cannot be had in sufficient quantity, it is necessary to have recourse to the universal humidity, in order to fortify, to awaken by it the vitriolic or coagulated aluminous universal humidity, and to excite it to act and to break its bonds.

But as minerals are very coagulated and very dry fixed bodies, they also require a more active and more penetrating menstruation than animals and vegetables; and for this reason we take the more fixed universal seed, that is, the spirit of nitre and salt. What saltpetre cannot do, salt does, or both together.

Although one should employ these universal sperms only in the case where the mineral moisture is in too small quantity, or too feeble, it is always necessary to have the precaution to make a good quantity of spirit of vitriol and alum; because they are a moist mineral, suitable for all red and white stars. The ancients, wisely and with reason, placed saltpeter next to vitriol, to acuate vitriol by saltpeter, in order to better penetrate mineral subjects; and they drew from saltpeter and vitriol, by distillation, a universal menstruation for the mineral kingdom. But as since, by a long ignorance, one did not know how to apply it well, one made use of it only like water to be separated, without knowing how to employ it with other uses;although the metals, by long digestion, there become always more volatile and that finally their tincture passes, in good part, by distillation; this is what no attention has been paid to. It has been rejected as useless, for the sole reason that it is a corrosive. What misleads is that in corrosive something of the metal always precipitates, in an earthly powder. In the second place, that the metals dissolved in the corrosives easily resume their first form by means of the precipitants. It was concluded that the corrosives were not homogeneous with the mineral kingdom, and this prevented us from understanding that this kingdom was corrosive in its origin.But the reason for these effects is that the metals, although resolute and disposed to volatilization by corrosives, always seek to become earthly; and if we knew what is the thing that can keep the metals always volatile and soft in the liquid, notwithstanding all the precipitants that we pour into it, we would see that the metals would never produce a metallic form, but rather unite with the precipitant, and form a third being.

It must have been realized that this thing is not found in the mineral kingdom; that we must seek it elsewhere and observe that, by this thing, the minerals arrive at a more noble and suitable alteration not only to the mineral nature, but to that of the vegetables and animals; so that they can use it without any damage. Do we not see that the spirits of vegetables, their waters, their oils and their vinegars remain longer and more constantly volatile than those of minerals; and that those of animals love volatility even more, though all things have a natural tendency to become earthly, as their resting place, out of which they are always in motion. For we see that all vinegars dry up and become earth; all the oils change into the nature of thick gum,and all the waters deposit an earth. Provided the rectified spirit finds only one subject to which it can attach itself, it becomes earthly as well as the others. The sole aim of all the Art of Medicinal Chemistry, in the mineral kingdom, is that the mineral be reduced by its own humidities; that then, as it preserves, by this reduction, a corrosive nature, heterogeneous to the vegetable and animal nature, this corrosive nature be corrected, dulcified and transmuted into a vegetable nature, and from there into an animal nature. is that the mineral is reduced by its own humidities;that then, as it preserves, by this reduction, a corrosive nature, heterogeneous to the vegetable and animal nature, this corrosive nature be corrected, dulcified and transmuted into a vegetable nature, and from there into an animal nature. is that the mineral is reduced by its own humidities; that then, as it preserves, by this reduction, a corrosive nature, heterogeneous to the vegetable and animal nature, this corrosive nature be corrected, dulcified and transmuted into a vegetable nature, and from there into an animal nature.

An infinity of menses and radical solvents have been described. Each believed his the best; however, all have obtained very little effect from it. Whereas, if they had properly examined the nature of things, they would have had much less distance to travel; since not only did they often make such radical menses themselves, but also because they found ready-made products to buy: it was only a question of knowing how to use them.

A menstruation, commonly called eau-forte or eau regale, is usually made from two parts of vitriol and one or two parts of saltpetre. After the vitriol has been calcined, it is mixed with raw saltpeter, and an etching is distilled from it, which has the same effect, however it is composed; but this is not the right method; here is the reason. When saltpeter is joined to vitriol, in the heat, the vitriol which has a burning sulphur, is contrary to the saltpeter, and it promptly drives out its spirit before it could attack and resolve the vitriol well.In this way the spirit of nitre passes into the receptacle and carries with it a small part of the most volatile vitriolic sulphur, of which even the etching retains the fetid odor (as one sees by comparing the odor of the etching with that of the spirit of nitre, distilled with the loam), and what remains is fixed vitriol, as far as saltpeter and fire could make it ; because the tormented, fire-flowing nitre was rather fixed than resolved.

The true method is this. Make a distilled etching, in the ordinary way, or a distilled nitre spirit with loam. Take a pound of it: pour it over a pound of pure vitriol, and calcined to whiteness: put them in a retort and distill the etching in the sand, by slow degrees, and only up to the third degree, so that the vitriol does not calcine there. For if you distill the etching violently on vitriol, you will rather fix the vitriol than resolve it. When the etching has passed, add another pound of new etching to it, and pour the whole over the vitriol remaining in the retorte: let it dissolve and digest together, one day and one night: then distill slowly and only up to the third part; the vitriol will be at the bottom, like butter, and greasy like an oil.

Take back the etching that has passed: add to it another pound of new etching, so that there are in all three pounds of etching joined to a pound of vitriol: pour it again on the vitriol: let it dissolve and digest again, day and night: then distill in the same way slowly by degrees, and you will see the greater part of the highly spiritualized vitriol pass with the etching; it is necessary to recohober until it passes completely and there is nothing left at the bottom of the retort: ​​then we will make it pass again, without addition, one, two or three times; and by this means one will have the true radical menstruation, proper to reduce all the red stars to their first matter and to make them similar to it. You can do the same process if you want, with the spirit-of-salt;but it is not necessary; since the preceding resolves all acidic and alkaline matters, as you will again see by experience.

If we want to make a difference between the red stars and the white stars, although this is by no means necessary, we must take the menstruation of vitriol for the red stars, and the menstruation of alum for the white stars. The menstruation of alum is done in the same way as that of vitriol, with etching or the spirit of nitre. Here is a manipulation that I publish, that most have passed over in silence and of which they had no knowledge: I only give it in small, but an educated and intelligent Artist will know how to draw inductions from small to large; I couldn't help him more. I give him a rule to volatilize fixed things. If he understands my reasons well, let him keep them secret;for many of those who will read this will find in it great difficulties which they will not know how to overcome,apertâ jam portâ, intra in conclave, amice . Pay attention that I have just given you the key to open all the locks; but one lock is not made like the other, and although it is necessary to open them by the same method, one will not fail to be often stopped and obliged to make several attempts; so that more than one will think that this key is not really made for all locks. This is why I still want to teach how to make use of this key, and to make myself understood better, I will first explain which are the alkalized subjects, the acid subjects, and those which hold the middle between one and the other.

Among the alkalized subjects, I include all the embryonic mineral sulfurs and the metallic sulfurs fixed in the supreme degree, such as are the minerals of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter, talc, hemeril, hematite and many other similar things, but which are not so well known, and in which Nature has strongly reverberated the acid, or coagulated, fixed and alkalized it. So all these things, without an alkaline being, hardly retrograde to their first Nature.

Among acidic subjects, I include all those in which the acid dominates and which it easily resolves, because they are not yet sufficiently fixed to be alkalized. Such are the Saturn, the Moon, the bismuth and other white and arsenical sulphur, which make known by themselves, in the solvents, of what quality they are, as I taught in the chapter on the generation of minerals. Consider therefore as acid all that the acid can attack, and as alkaline all that the alkali can attack; and whatever attacks both indiscriminately, regard it as belonging to the nature of both.

Among the number of these hermaphrodite things, you can count all the minerals and all the metals in which the acid has begun to settle and which, by too weak a digestion, has remained in an intermediate state. Such are Venus, Mars, Mercury, etc., for such matters can be resolved by an acid mind as well as by an alkaline mind, either separate or united.

This distinction should not, however, be taken so literally, in relation to the menses mentioned above; for if one wants to treat such subjects, by the universal menses only, as by etching or by the spirit of nitre or salt, they can suffer, in one or the other subject, some retardation because of the subtle ubiquity of the said spirits. But if they are specified with their own vitriolic or aluminous mineral acid, then this attention is dispensed with.

We shall therefore divide the subjects according to the red or white menstruation, that is to say of vitriol or alum, into red and white metallic minerals, of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Moon; and then in marcassitic minerals, of mercury, of antimony, of bismuth, of zinc, and in all sorts of other marcasites of Sun, Moon, Venus, Saturn and Mercury; and then in embryonated fixed sulphurs, namely hematite, hemeril, bolus, sanguine, magnet, feather alum, calamine, tutie, etc., then again in embryonated volatile sulphurs, which are in antimony, in bismuth, in arsenic, in vitriol, in sulfur rivers and in all kinds of volatile marcasites and other minerals.

We will generally teach the manner of resolving these four species, and of exalting them in quintessence.

So take a miner, whichever one you like; and after having pulverized it, make it redden in a crucible by a more or less strong fire, according to its fixity. When it is reddened, sprinkle it with a quantity of common sulphur; stir everything well together with a wire, until the sulfur is quite burnt; then the mineral is prepared to be able to be dissolved in the menses.

If you want to prepare it even better, after having pulverized it well and before turning it red, you will wash it on the sheet to separate the stone from the metallic part.

Then take apart of this mineral thus prepared; put it in an alembic; for over three parts of the aforesaid menstruation, made of vitriol for the reds, and of alum for the whites; digest over the ash fire; for gently, by inclination, which is clear and resolved; and on what is not, for again three times its weight of menstruation, and let it digest until everything is resolved and becomes a clear liquor. Then the mine is in its first state; because if you distill this liquor with sand by the retorte or by the alembic, until the third part, that you let cool the residue and that you put it in the cellar so that it crystallizes, you will have a vitriol and materiam primam illius minerae renatam .If you still resolve this vitriol in three parts of new menstruation, distill it and cohabit by retort until all is past, you will have a vaporous and primordial liquor which cannot be retrograded without alteration; for as soon as you want to make it retrograde further, there happens a transmutation and a specification into something else, either into a vegetable, or into an animal, or into a universal; but as long as it remains a corrosive vapor, it is in the primordial state of minerals; it touches with the root the mineral kingdom, and with the head the vegetable kingdom; and in this situation, it can very easily be transmuted by vegetable into animal. Here you have the whole mineral with all its principles;for it has lost neither its sulphur, nor its arsenic, nor its marcasite, as refined metals have lost them in melting; and all its vital and nutritious spirits have been preserved.

If you want to coagulate and fix this liquor or mineral oil, it must be cooked and digested in a water bath for three days and three nights, in a low curcurbite, with its capital and container, and distill the superfluous humidity. When nothing wants to rise any more, return to the ashes; gently distill all the phlegm or weak spirit: put the residue in a flask and let it coagulate in ashes; there will come from it a saline stone more fluid in the fire than oil, and which in the air will freeze like ice. There is no need to plug your bottle, because nothing rises. In this way, you will have the mineral quintessence, but all corrosive and harmful to human nature; because in this state, it is still mineral.To make it useful to men, it must be transmuted into plant or animal, by plants and animals; for plants and animals are man's food, not minerals. As for the minerals which have passed through the fire, such as common sulphur, molten antimony, bismuth, fine gold, copper, tin, lead, we must make them retrograde by homogeneous principles and add what we have taken away by the fire. Now we have removed from crud antimony its stony matrix and its sulphurous and arsenical acid spirit, by means of which antimony could have been reduced more easily to its first nature, by aiding it with the universal acid or vitriolic mineral Common sulphur, made from the mineral sulphur;is deprived of its spirit, its sulphurous oil and its coppery essence, from which, by leaching, vitriol is extracted.

Here is the way to prepare each metal and each mineral and restore to it its principles which have been taken from it. Gold calcines with sulphur, arsenic and antimony; and the lime, which is made of it, easily resolves with the said menstruation. Silver, copper, lead, and iron, as well as tin ore, calcine with sulfur and resolve with the same menstruation, as also mercury sublimated with sulfur and common salt. Vitriol also resolves there. Antimony, thoroughly mixed with sulfur in the fire until the sulfur is burnt, also resolves in the same menstruation.

As for sulphur, as it contains a dry oil and since no oil units easily with a salt or a saline menstruation, Nature has shown us a clean and homogeneous menstruation, namely oil, which is a fluent resolved sulfur with which it must be cooked into a fragrant liver, which does not smell so bad as that which is made with rapeseed, linseed or olive oil; then this liver resolves into a salt or a vitriolic liquor.

After the Reader has in the aforesaid manner reduced all the metals and minerals into a vitriol, and this into a liquor, and has coagulated this liquor into salt or into a saline stone, all is prepared and made fit for vegetable and animal transmutation, as we will thereafter tell.

I have said, in truth, that the corrosive quality is naturally attached to the mineral kingdom, and that it is contrary and heterogeneous to the vegetable kingdom, although less so than to the animal kingdom. I have also said that a corrosive could not be useful to man, but that it is rather a poison for him. The Artist must know how to change this poison into an antidote or counterpoison; and this can only be done by dulcification.

This dulcification is a great secret which is not mentioned anywhere. Common chemists temper corrosives well with spirits of wine, but this does not change their nature; whereas true chemists know how to make them, by a veritable transmutation, perfectly homogeneous with vegetable nature and animal nature. We are going to sincerely discover the process and, to make it better understood, we will place here before the reader's eyes a tree of dulcification and harmony, which will indicate the order in which the animal must be united with the vegetable, and this one, or both, with the mineral.

CHAPTER X

Tree of sweetness.



In order for the Reader to be persuaded that, in all that I do, I seek to conform to the fundamental laws of Nature, and that I scrupulously imitate her in her processes, he has only to consider how she herself dulcifies the minerals and renders them homogeneous with human and vegetable nature. First the corrosive mineral vapours, which rise from the center of the earth, deposit in its entrails their strongest corrosive which there attacks the stones and the earth, corrodes them, resolves them and coagulates them; for there are no distillers who do not know that corrosive mineral spirits never rise so high as sweet, vegetable and animal vapours; since one is obliged, to make them pass, to use a lower vessel such as the retorte, and a greater degree of fire.

When the strongest corrosive has been deposited in the earth, the vapors pushed by the central heat rise higher, to the plants; and what biting they still have is taken, sucked, drawn to their roots, and transmuted into their nature. What the vegetable kingdom has not retained with me, rises still higher in the lower region of the air, to the animal kingdom where the animals draw to them, by respiration, these then softened vapours, transmute them into their food, and finally into their specified animal nature. This is what the tree of dulcification is all about.

Thus Nature does not suddenly jump from the mineral kingdom to the animal kingdom; but it passes through the vegetable kingdom, and a mineral must be changed into a vegetable so that animals can use it for their food. Nature likewise descends by degrees from the animal kingdom to the mineral. It first rots the animals on the surface of the earth, and reduces them to an essential nitrous salt, which it uses to give growth to plants; but the water carries part of this salt through the cracks and crevices of the earth to its center, where, finding a greater quantity of salts already fermented and mineralized, it is transmuted into their nature. For, as we have already said, there can be no changes from one nature to another, unless the latter exceeds in quantity.If two enemies, of equal strength, fight against each other, neither of them wins the victory; but if one is superior to the other, the weaker must succumb. It is the same with the different natures; and we must consult this rule for dulcification. I do not mean that, to soften a corrosive, it should be drowned in a large quantity of some vegetable liquor; Nature has its weights and measures, to which the Artist must conform, and he will have no difficulty in knowing them. For if a thing has too much sweetener, it leaves the superfluous by distillation, and if it has too little, it is easy to judge by the taste. It is the same with the different natures; and we must consult this rule for dulcification.I do not mean that, to soften a corrosive, it should be drowned in a large quantity of some vegetable liquor; Nature has its weights and measures, to which the Artist must conform, and he will have no difficulty in knowing them. For if a thing has too much sweetener, it leaves the superfluous by distillation, and if it has too little, it is easy to judge by the taste. It is the same with the different natures; and we must consult this rule for dulcification. I do not mean that, to soften a corrosive, it should be drowned in a large quantity of some vegetable liquor; Nature has its weights and measures, to which the Artist must conform, and he will have no difficulty in knowing them.For if a thing has too much sweetener, it leaves the superfluous by distillation, and if it has too little, it is easy to judge by the taste.

So I say: if you want to achieve a real dulcification of minerals, that is to say, to make them homogeneous with the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom, proceed like Nature: do not go from one extreme to the other without going through the middle; but advance the minerals towards animality, through plants.

If you put together the three volatiles or the three acids of the three kingdoms, they will fight, like two fires; whereas if, following the order of Nature, you first put the volatile animal with the volatile vegetable, the conjunction will take place without repugnance. After that, add the volatile mineral to it; then, if you distill them, they will rise inseparably together, where all three will remain behind.

Take volatile spirit of urine and spirit of wine, equal parts: pour them one into the other: then add the acid phlegm of vitriol; they will unite without repugnance. Take even animal acid and vegetable acid, of each a part: mingle them together: add to it a part of the spirit of vitriol; they will still unite very easily; because the vegetable is the copulator which is associated and assimilated as well to the animal kingdom as to the mineral kingdom.

But to leave you nothing to be desired, I will teach you how to extract these different principles.

Take putrefied urine: distill its volatile spirit in a water bath: rectify it in a vial: separate the coarsest phlegm from it, until it becomes very clear and crystalline; and keep it apart; you will have the prepared volatile urine.

Further distill the residues in a bain-marie to a liquor the thickness of honey; the coarser phlegm will be separated from it: remove this phlegm: mix what remains with the leached ashes, until the mass is almost dry, and you can put it into balls: then put it in a retort, and distill from it in the sand all that can pass; you will have the animal acid with a fetid oil: separate the oil per tritorium or by a glass funnel: filter the acid and the volatile salt which has risen with it: distill it again very gently through the retort, and it will also be prepared.

Take from a good old wine: draw from it the powder-proof spirit of wine, and it also will be prepared as it is taught in many books. After you have distilled your spirits of wine through the alembic, take what remains, and evaporate it in a copper vessel until it has a honeyed consistency or until a sour vapor rises in the nose. Take this acid liquor: mix it with coal dust, or with leached ashes, and distill by the retort; it will initially pass a rather coarse phlegm, then the acid of the wine and finally, a fetid oil: separate the oil from the acid per tritorium or by a funnel: rectify the acid of the phlegm, two or three times, and it will also be prepared.

In this way, you will have prepared all that is necessary for the sweetening of all corrosives, and you will experience that this way of sweetening is as far removed from that which is ordinarily used as heaven is from earth. I don't want to praise it; practice will do enough.

Method to sweeten

Take therefore spirit-of-wine and volatile spirit of urine, equal parts: put them together in a high curcurbite: distill in water-bath and ashes, until nothing remains behind but a rather coarse and spiritless phlegm; and it will be separated. Then take the acid of urine and the acid of wine: pour them together into a retort, and distill them; they will also be separated.

Then take any corrosive, either liquid or dry, one part, and pour it over three parts of the prepared acid: put them in a water-bath and distill from them, in a low alembic, the phlegm until the consistency of oil. Taste this oil; if it has no more corrosive, that is enough. If it still has any, pour three parts of acid into it again, and distil as the first time. You will repeat the same operation until the remaining oil has nothing but acidity; then for over this oil three parts of prepared spirits of wine: distill in a bain-marie until oily; it will soften and become more homogeneous with human nature. For over three more parts of new spirit of wine, still distilling in the same way.The more you repeat this operation, the more the oil will become soft and pleasant. It should be noted that the spirit of wine passes, as well as the acid, almost always weak or in phlegm; for the volatile salt remains with the corrosive, dulcifying it; and it must be so; otherwise the corrosive would not be transmuted.

After you have dulcified your corrosive in this way, put it in a retort: ​​distil from it the sweet and very agreeable oil which all animals and vegetables can take without the slightest danger. It is then the quintessence and the magisterium of the mineral from which you drew it.

If you want to coagulate this oil into a salty and fusible stone like butter, put it in a small high alembic, with its capital and container, in a bain-marie: distil the superfluous humidity, by degrees; for the quintessence does not rise easily in a bain-marie: then put it in the ashes, and still distill by slow degrees the humidity which has not wanted to rise or pass into the bain-marie. It will thicken more and more, until it flows in the fire like oil, and condenses in the air like ice. You will therefore have it, in this way, in liquid and in dry form; thank God for it.

Observe again that the stronger your acid and your spirit of wine, the more quickly the dulcification takes place. Now, their strength consists in the fact that their recolated water, or their phlegm, has been separated from them, and that they have been concentrated as much as possible.

You will further observe that if you want to apply the mineral, or the mineral corrosive essence only to the vegetable work and not to the animals, the dulcification with the spirit of wine is not necessary (although it is good to conjoin the spirit and the acid of urine with the spirit of wine and the vegetable acid) and if you want to apply it to the mineral nature, you do not need any dulcification at all, unless you wish it well. . Dulcification, as I have just taught it, serves to make minerals suitable to human nature, and fit for the healing of diseases.

A crowd of objections will arise. Some will say that this process is contrary to those of all true Philosophers, who expressly command the separation from each mineral of its sulphur, its mercury and its salt, as their proper principles. Instead, they will say, that I make of each mineral a salt or a vitriol: of this one a corrosive oil, and that I fix this again in salt. Where then, they will say, will remain the sulfur and the mercury in dry and constant form?

My dear Reader, whoever you are, if you seek to follow the path which is described in all the books, I will confess to you frankly that you have not yet thoroughly studied the nature of minerals, and that even less have you heard the Philosophers.

Have you not read in their writings (although such high intelligence is not needed here, for their way is a higher way) that sal metallorum is lapis philosophorum and magisterium totius artis. Now, this salt contains and conceals in itself mercury and sulphur. When made into an oil, it is called sulphur, and its active inner spirit is mercury. In this way sulphur, salt and mercury are joined together. When this oil is again coagulated and fixed in salt (as indeed it first coagulates by the slow abstraction of moisture), let it flow constantly in the heat, like an oil; that in the cold it condenses like ice; and that it melts in all kinds of liquors, as sugar melts in water, without any precipitation: then it is a medicine, which cures all diseases whatever.

One could still object to me and say that this operation is not only done with corrosives, but even that I leave the corrosives there without separating them.

To answer it, I am obliged to enter into a long discussion, and to go back to the origin of all things. Consider then that in the beginning God created two things, from which everything originated; namely the spirit or the seed; and universal chaotic water, as body, receptacle and instrument of the spirit or the seed. The water is visible and palpable, but the spirit in it is always invisible, until by the degrees of putrefaction, separation, conjunction, coagulation, and fixation, which follow each other, it has become visible, palpable, and corporeal, as we have sufficiently indicated above.

Now, water is a recolaceum, and it coagulates with the semen only as much as the latter needs indispensably to take on a body. Nature drives out all the superfluous, by the violence of fire and heat. Pay close attention to this: the recolated water is an instrument and a receptacle of the universal spirit or of the seed, by means of which the spirit must do its operations, fix and volatilize itself and become fixed and volatile, celestial or terrestrial. Without this water the spirit would be dry and would remain without action, as if asleep or dead. As long as this recolated water is with the spirit or the spirit with the water, it never has any rest, and it is always excited to act.This is clearly seen in animals and vegetables, especially in those which abound in humidity, and in which the recolated water is not separated. As long as the animal lives and the vegetable grows green, the spirit spreads with the water in all their parts, digests, putrefies, separates, coagulates and thus distributes the food for the increase and for the preservation of the subject. When this subject dies, the spirit acts on the contrary; and instead of having previously helped and nourished the vegetable or the animal, it begins in the very moment that the animal or the vegetable has lost its balsamic vivifying spirit, to reduce it to rot; it dissolves it and regenerates it into something else.Now, he does all this by water, without which he would not know how to act, as it is easy to prove. When this subject dies, the spirit acts on the contrary; and instead of having previously helped and nourished the vegetable or the animal, it begins in the very moment that the animal or the vegetable has lost its balsamic vivifying spirit, to reduce it to rot; it dissolves it and regenerates it into something else. Now, he does all this by water, without which he would not know how to act, as it is easy to prove. When this subject dies, the spirit acts on the contrary;and instead of having previously helped and nourished the vegetable or the animal, it begins in the very moment that the animal or the vegetable has lost its balsamic vivifying spirit, to reduce it to rot; it dissolves it and regenerates it into something else. Now, he does all this by water, without which he would not know how to act, as it is easy to prove.

When one essencifies a subject and coagulates it to its entire dryness, the spirit is then as if it were dead or asleep; because the recolaced water, which is its means and its instrument, has been taken from it. But if he finds any of them, either universals like air, dew, rainwater, or species, which happens when it is given to vegetable or animal subjects and made to be taken by them as a medicine, then he again acquires superfluous moisture, or a specified watery instrument, which again excites him to action; and in this state it cures or destroys the animal or the vegetable, according as it is applied or prepared.

I say again that the more the universal spirit is separated from its recolated water, the more it becomes fixed and concentrated; that when this fixed and concentrated spirit is made spirituous by excessive heat, it becomes a fire and a devouring dragon, which destroys everything; that for this reason spirit of nitre, eau-forte, and spirit-de-sel are nothing but a corrosive fire, and that in this state they are contrary to all individuals, chiefly to animals and vegetables: but as we have indicated means to appease their furious cruelty, and to reduce them to an agreeable sweetness, an Amateur need not fear to employ them. He must know that, if the spirit or the seed does not have such mordacity, it will be impossible for it to resolve stones and metals.Besides, if this way does not please him,

I will now respond to the objection that may be made to me, that I leave the universal seed, or the spirit with the spirit of nitre, or the etching, etc., that is to say the solvent with what is dissolved. Here is the reason. When the universal seed is conjoined with the specified seed, and thus assumes the same specification, the mother is conjoined with the child, and the child derives its nourishment from the mother, from whose substance and blood it was formed: nothing conforms more to Nature.

All universals render themselves homogeneous to species, and take on their quality; so that when the universal spirit is concentrated in the species, their virtue is increased and exalted; and the more concentrated and sharp it is, the more powerfully it operates, and the more it is given in small doses.

I did not, however, teach to give this acute spirit to animals and plants, before it had been dulcified. But prove me wrong, to give it after dulcification. Who does not want to believe my theory, will learn it by practice, which will demonstrate it to him clear as day.

I will add only one of the simplest examples, by which every Artist will instantly understand the quick change of the spirit or the sharp and corrosive seed, into a sweet one.

Take dephlegmated spirit of vitriol, or oil of vitriol, one part; for over it simply distilled vinegar, six parts: distill it to the ashes until oily; there shall pass, into a curcurbite not too low, in the first or second degree of fire, a clear phlegm or recolated water: pour into it still more distilled vinegar, six parts: distil again until oily, and repeat this operation up to three times: then taste the oil of vitriol on the tongue, and you will see whether the mordacity has not in the greater part been changed to sweetness. To sweeten it even more, for spirits of wine over it, six parts: distill in a bain-marie in an alembic, until the oil, as you did with the vinegar, with the exception that the spirits of wine must be distilled in a bain-marie:repeat this operation three times in the same way: the oil of vitriol, especially if the acid and the spirit of wine have been very strong, will become as sweet as sugar, and so sweet that everything you drink and eat will appear sweet to you, so much does this oil fill the pores of the tongue. Thus, since with the azoth and the spirit of wine alone the corrosives are dulcified to this point, what will it be when the animal kingdom has been added to them?

Here is another objection that will be raised against me, by saying that I establish only two principles; namely, the recolated water and the spirit or seed which is hidden therein; that consequently, there is nothing else to separate than the recolated water: it follows from there that all the whole globe of the earth, all the mountains, all the stones, the rocks, the meadows, the fields and the earth are only one spirit, one seed, one coagulated sperm.

If anyone would not believe that the whole mass of the earth is a sperm, let him take earth, in which place and from which he will, the first is the best: let him wash the salt, so that the corrosive spirit seed does not kill itself there: let him dry it and make it redden a little in the fire; let him observe its weight and for over spirit of nitre or etching; and if they do not attack it, let him pour salt-spirit into it, until it is entirely dissolved: let him distil the spirit from it; and he will find at the bottom a saline, white and corrosive earth, which earth has retrogressed by its first principle or by its primordial spirit, to its first nature, that is to say in salt. Now consider this earth, whether it is damned earth, or faeces.

It is still necessary to explain a point in relation to which a large number of chemists are in error. When they use aquafortis, aqua regia, spirit of salt, etc., to resolve minerals, and when they see that these solvents, especially aqua regia, do not act on them or only act very little, they say that they are worthless and that they are spoiled, while they very often spoil them themselves. For if they want to dissolve the sun, they add a fourth part of salt armonia or spirit-of-salt with the etching. If the etching is well made, and it contains very little water, it resolves the sun; but if it contains little etching, and too much water, it leaves the sun in its state, or it dissolves very little of it. This is where the damage results.

If you want to solve a solar sulphurous ore, such as solar marcasite, auric or solar sulphur, with aqua regia which you have greatly fortified, it will hardly solve the eighth part of it, although before it has solved the sun entirely. What could be the cause? It's this one. Etching is an acid; and spirit-of-salt or salt armoniac is an alkali. Everyone knows that when acid and alkali are joined together, they kill each other, precipitate, sweeten and fix; and that thus there results a corrosive third salt, which, in the liquid, has not the power to attack so hard a body: and when it is coagulated, it fixes rather than resolves. So when a pound of etching is weak and there is a lot of water, it kills itself,rushes and fixes itself with the four ounces of salt armoniac or spirit-of-sel, and it hardly attacks them; if it is strong, it attacks well; but nevertheless the alkali is in too large a quantity; we see the proof of it when, with it, we want to dissolve a stony marcasite. It more willingly attacks the sun, which is a refined body, separated from all stones, from all sulphurites and from all gangues; but not the marcasite nor the gravel, although they are washed and separated from the earth on the sheet with the greatest care; for they always preserve, in their smallest parts, a mixture of their stony matrices, on which the acid fixes itself and kills itself, as well as on the sulfur of the marcasites. He sometimes does not attack it at all;so that in the extractions and in the solutions, one has no satisfaction from them; for the more a body is desiccated and separated from all humidity, the less a humidity can act there, unless it is awakened by a humidity of the same degree, as by its medium, as practice shows.

Take a pound of eau-forte, and four ounces of spirit-of-salt: mix them together: distill gently by the retorte, with the ashes, until a rather strong oleosity: then put them at the coolness; crystals will form there. These are a regenerated nitre; for aquafortis is a nitrous acid, and spirit of salt an alkali. This is how the tip of the acid is broken off, to the point of not being able to attack with the same force.

It is the same with armoniacal salt or common salt. Distil a pound of aquafortis, over four ounces of armoniacal salt or common salt, by the retorte, over the ash fire: draw out the caput mortuum: compare it with the armoniacal salt again, trying them on the tongue; and you will find that the salt armoniac has retained in it a great acidity of aquafortis. Now, as much as this has lost acidity on the armoniacal salt, so much has it weakened and debilitated, so that it can no longer act so strongly.

To prove that etching is killed with marcasite, you have only to dissolve marcasite in aqua regia; and when it will not dissolve any more, you will decant all the liquid, until dryness. For over the residues of spring water: put it in a warm place, and cook it a little: then for this water: filter it and coagulate it until a reasonable dryness; you will find a saline earth or a vitriol, which is made of aqua regia and marcasite. We see from this that the aqua regia has killed itself with the marcasite, and that it has solved very little of it.

In order that aqua regia, and other similar menses, dissolve a greater quantity of them than they usually do, it is necessary to add to them, indeed, alkalized subjects and to acuate them with an alkali: but not in such a way that the acid can be completely killed there. Thus, for example, for a pound of eau-forte, I take only two ounces of armoniac salt, and I digest them gently in sand or ashes for a day and a night, at low heat: I then distill it and use it immediately.

In this way, I dissolve two, three, and even four times as much as another with his weakened dissolvent.

But someone will be able to ask me for what reason it is necessary to add salt armoniac or spirit of salt to the eau-forte, since, without that, it is already very strong. Here it is: I said that all minerals are formed by the universal acid, and this acid forms the lesser metals more easily than the perfect ones; for in the imperfect it is not yet fixed and so strongly alkalized, nor made so earthly as in the sun and in the solar subjects, and consequently it still dominates there more or less, according as the mineral or the metal is farther or nearer to perfection. It is for this reason that etching dissolves it, whereas it cannot dissolve solar subjects; because one acid easily attacks the other;whereas, in strongly fixed and alkalized minerals, it is blunted and completely killed. So, when we want them to be equally attacked and dissolved, we must add an alkali to the etching, in order to awaken, by its means, its like. The fixed alkali, once aroused, itself unties its bonds by the aid of the acid, and easily lends itself to being retrograded into an acid; for all that is volatile begs to become acid, and all that is acid begs to become alkali or fixed. On the contrary, all that is alkaline seeks again to become volatile, so that the higher becomes the lower, and the lower the higher, by a perpetual circulation. and lends itself readily to retrograde to an acid;for all that is volatile begs to become acid, and all that is acid begs to become alkali or fixed. On the contrary, all that is alkaline seeks again to become volatile, so that the higher becomes the lower, and the lower the higher, by a perpetual circulation. and lends itself readily to retrograde to an acid; for all that is volatile begs to become acid, and all that is acid begs to become alkali or fixed. On the contrary, all that is alkaline seeks again to become volatile, so that the higher becomes the lower, and the lower the higher, by a perpetual circulation.

The alkali which dissolves its similar alkaline subjects, does not dissolve the acid subjects. The reason is that the alkali is not so penetrating nor so subtle, and always retains within itself a greasy earthiness, which prevents it from penetrating into their pores: and even so it attacks them, it only corrodes them and reduces them to dust, or makes them swell like a sponge. And note that by the term alkali I mean not only the volatilized and fixed salts alkalines, such as are all the volatilized alkalis of animals, the armoniacal salt, the common salt, and other fixed alkalis: but also the volatilized and fixed alkaline earth.

You claim, I will be told again, to awaken the alkali by other alkalis, such as salt, the precipitate of vitriol, or the sublimate of armoniacal salt, or common salt. But will not the alkali, on the contrary, be more fortified, and will it not kill itself with the acid, in one way or the other?

I reply that in truth, when etching contains much volatile or fixed alkali, it kills rather than dissolves, as I have said above. But when it contains very little, that cannot prevent it from dissolving. As many pores as the too great quantity of alkali salt would occupy, so many occupy the fixed or volatile alkali, awakened and resolved. For the solution consists solely in the saturation of the menses, the pores of which must therefore be empty.

This is why, when the too great quantity of armoniacal salt or salt precipitate fills the pores of the etching, with their subtle alkaline earth, this water cannot dissolve a marcasite.

But as many empty pores as there are, so much does it take in marcasite. This shows why many Practitioners cannot manage to dissolve their subjects.

Observe also that Nature easily makes, in the lower kingdom, of a volatile an acid, and of an acid an alkali. Even when a subject appears quite volatile, it nevertheless contains in itself a part of acid and alkali, although the volatile has the superiority which prevents the acid and the alkali from dominating. But if the acid has the superiority, it associates itself with its like and willingly takes another acid into itself. Likewise, if the alkali has the superiority, although it is mixed with the volatile and with the acid, it nevertheless loves its like.

This is what an Artist must pay attention to, if he wants to avoid a number of faults.

I always establish the principles, so that if I happened to be mistaken in the consequences, one could draw more exact ones, and not be misled.

The Philosophers say: our dissolvent and what is dissolved must be together, or both volatile, or both fixed. Second, the solvent must be homogeneous with what is being dissolved.

Third, menstruation must be ubiquitously mercurial, assimilating itself to all things. Now, it is doubted that etching and the spirit of vitriol have this quality. But I taught above that the dissolvent stays with what is dissolved. I have also proved that niter and salt and their spirits are homogeneous to all subjects; for I have demonstrated that they are universal, and no one is unaware that all universals are homogeneous with the specified subjects, and the specified subjects with the universals. Their universality also proves that they are ubiquitous mercurials.

Someone will say: I am willing to grant that nitre and salt are ubiquitous and universal, with respect to all specified beings; but vitriol is surely an acid and a mixture, which appears to be contrary to the universal and mercurial menstruation, because vitriol contains more sulfur than mercury.

We have proved above that vitriol is a primum Ens of minerals, and all Artists know that it contains mercury, sulfur and salt. It does not matter that it is more sulphurous than mercurial; since we have shown above that mercury and all mercurial arsenical subjects derive their essences from sulphur. Several authors actually posit that vitriol is the first matter of metals, as well as mercury. Some have recommended it to be materia lapidis , following this sentence: Visita Interiora Terræ, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.Now, if vitriol is the first matter of metals, it must necessarily have the power, after its resolution, to reduce metals to their first matter and that it be homogeneous with all minerals; if it is materia lapidis , it must therefore be an extract or quintessence of all minerals.

It is also agreed that nitre and salt are universal subjects: that a large number of authors recommend looking for them in all heaps of manure, and they call them everything in all things, because they can be found everywhere. Since they are universal, they are a subject capable of receiving any form and any specification. With vitriol they are specified, unite together and remain with it, both volatile and fixed. Everything they resolve they make again volatile, and again fixed; they remain inseparably linked with it, and if one undertakes to separate them, one will only separate the volatile part: the fixed part will remain behind; for one seed willingly remains with another seed, especially the specified one with the universal; and they allow the recolated water to detach from them.

It is therefore an error which partakes of madness, that of several Artists who imagine that they separate the menses by abstraction or by reverberation, or by digesting and burning spirits of wine on them, etc. Nice discovery! If they only tasted the menstruation they distilled from it, they would soon experience that the strength is almost halved, and they would see it even better if, with this menstruation, they wanted to dissolve some new subjects for which it would be too weak.

Let only the dissolved bodies be considered, and weigh them before and after their resolution; we will see the difference in their weights; for everything that must become fixed, that is to say the acid, attaches itself to the earth; and all that must become volatile rises above. Let one boast as much as one will of being skilful in theory and in practice; it is a fact which must be admitted.

I positively assure you that if someone says or writes that he has a period of dew or rainwater or other menstrual waters, tasteless, etc., these are pure lies, and which are very reprehensible since they engage Artists in crazy expenses which only end in causing them to perish with grief and misery.

Let us examine the menses, and separate them into four parts, that is to say, into volatile, acid, alkali, and a mixture composed of the three. It is quite certain that all volatiles, such as dew, rain, spirit of wine, spirit of urine, etc., in no way attack a coagulated body; and even when it also contained acid, they can dye themselves so little of it and be satisfied with it that it would be necessary to use five or six buckets of it to dissolve only a pound of it; and when the solution is made, it is not yet a real solution but only an extraction; for the spirit of wine flies away by distillation and the dissolved body remains at the bottom, dry and extended in atoms. It is no better than before; it is only more subtle and reduced to smaller parts.

If azoth, or vegetable or animal acid, be used, they will attack, in truth, with more force than the spirit of wine and urine or an extreme volatile. But what kind of subjects will they attack? It will not be a stone or an alkalized mineral; they will only easily solve matters which are by themselves acidic, or which are filled with a great deal of acid. With ten pounds of distilled wine acid, one cannot dissolve a pound of Venus or Mars, which are so open; whereas with two or three pounds of spirit of nitre or of salt, of spirit or oil of vitriol or oil of sulphur, I will dissolve a pound of Mars, still more of Venus; and I will reduce this solution, first after the distillation, to the first material, that is to say, to vitriol.If I extract the acid from it, by distillation, I will have a verdigris or a crocus martial left, and even in small quantities. With a spiritualized alkali, more is dissolved, indeed, but without acid, all dissolution is almost like a sword thrust through water.

Will you compose, fortify, and mix the menses above, to see if they will not dissolve more than before, and better than the acute corrosives alone?

Mix the spirit of wine with the vinegar, or a volatile with the acid, or the spirit of urine with its acid, or all these four together: then pour them on a calcined stone, according to the use, or on another strongly bound mineral, in sufficient quantity.

You will see how much they will operate, that is to say nothing. However, if you pour them on an open subject, or one not so strongly bound, such as vitriol, alum, Venus, Mars, Moon, Saturn, etc., they will attack it first and turn it into sugar-sweet vitriol. But in what quantity? Of a pound, on which you will have poured six pounds of menstruation. It will only dissolve from Venus or Mars barely four large, up to one ounce. I'm not talking about vitriol and alum; for they are purely salts of very easy solution. Here is your period so powerful and non-corrosive.

If you pour a mineral acid, such as aquaforte, spirit of vitriol, etc., on the vinegar or on the spirit of wine, you indeed acuate the vinegar, etc., but you dulcify the corrosive, and kill it so that it cannot attack with as much force as before. This menstruation, however, will dissolve more than vinegar and spirit of wine alone.

If you pour etching on sublimated vitriol, etc., or on a corrosive, a spirit of urine or an azoth of urine, you completely kill the corrosive and make it a third salt, which dissolves very little or not at all. But what could be the cause? It's this one. The more the corrosives are extended, the weaker they become, and the less they dissolve. On the contrary, the more concentrated the corrosives, the more mordicant they are and the more violently they attack. Spirit of wine and azoth are extended and dilated corrosives: they are entirely filled with recolated water; and even when, by rectification, they are made very igneous, a pound does not operate so much as two ounces, or an ounce of dephlegmated etching. You will experience it in practice.

For if you take a very igneous spirit of wine, and a very rectified igneous vinegar, three pounds of spirit of wine, a pound of vinegar acid, and half a pound of salt of tartar; whether you pour the spirit of wine on the salt of tartar, then the vinegar, whether you put them to digest in a bain-marie or in ashes and distill them gently, there will pass a very clear insipid phlegm, almost in the same quantity and in the same weight as the spirit of wine and the vinegar that you have added to it. Weigh also the residues of the salt of tartar, which has retained to itself the acuteness or the volatile spirit of spirits of wine and vinegar; you will understand by this that such a large quantity of spirits of wine and vinegar contained only about half an ounce of acute or volatile salt.For, on the contrary, a pound of etching or spirit of dephlegmated nitre, on half a pound of salt of tartar; you will find, after distilling the phlegm from it, that the salt of tartar has increased in quantity by half, or at least, by a quarter.

Now consider the difference between solvents.

If anyone affirms that he has an insipid solvent, it can only be a saline spirit, resolved and fortified by its own acid, and a volatile foreign one; as if I were melting together salt and saltpeter in dew or in distilled rainwater, and filtering it. Now, if such a menstruation is distilled in a bain-marie, or with ashes, a beautiful medium salt will be found there, or a mortified acid, similar to nitre: and if it were distilled a hundred times, without concentrating it in a small volume to make the acid dominate, it is still powerless to dissolve the metals. It will take the tincture well, but it extracts so little of their sulfur, by distillation, that one regrets the trouble and the time employed. This extract is called a sulfur of the Sun and the Moon.But what sulfur is it? It is first claimed that it must be the greatest cordial and have the virtue of rejuvenating, like real drinking gold. With this, some Philosophers say, perhaps with the intention of deceiving, that it is a sulphur, but that salt and mercury must be extracted from the residues.

Now, I beg a chemist, an honest man, learned and compassionate, to tell me how much time, expense, embarrassment and care are needed; what waste there is of all kinds of precious materials and waters, and how much coal must be burned before one can even separate the sulfur and the salt (for as for the flowing mercury, I do not want to hear of it at all) and reduce them to liquid. All this work is nothing but nonsense imagined at pleasure, to deceive the disciples of the Art and make them take the delusion.

I will not say, however, that it is impossible to make a flowing mercury from metals: but it is quite useless work, very long and very costly, and I do not know how the idea arose, nor why mercury is sought so eagerly in the mines and in the metals, seeing that in no mine (except mercury's own mine) one never finds any flowing mercury, but vitriolic acids, alum, sulphur, from orpiment, marcasite, etc., from which the metals are born by degrees and are formed , and not from flowing mercury, as we have said above.

I tell you, you chemists, do not study yourself to extract sulphur: you would very much deceive yourself in that; for it is only a certain part of the stolen metal, and nothing more. It is necessary that the whole body of the metal be dissolved and reduced to liquid, that it can rise in the distillation and that it be a sweet, spirituous oil, or a spiritualized salt, which, appropriate to human nature, is not fixed but volatile, so that, through the arch of the stomach, it can be reduced immediately to smoke and vapor, and that in this form it can penetrate into the blood and with it into all the veins, even into the marrow and the bones. This is what makes real medicine;for if the medicine is fixed, it is necessary, in order for it to produce its effect, for the archaea to render it volatile. So make it yourself volatile and homogeneous, if you want to bring dying people back to life. Although I have said almost everywhere in this treatise that medicines must be fixed, I have only done so because such is the general prejudice, from which one would soon have reversed if one considered that the animal itself makes all things volatile for its food and for its growth.

You must not, however, imagine that I want to have a very volatile medicine, like the spirit of wine: being excited by the heat, it would penetrate too quickly through all the veins, and would come out through the pores of the skin, or be evacuated by the stools, and would have very little effect. I want it to be neither too volatile nor too fixed, but half fixed and half volatile, as all acids are. In this average state, it attaches itself to the blood, unites with it, circulates with it in all the veins, and expels diseases through urine and sweat. It must therefore be an acid, having regard to the degree of fixity. But as for its quality, it must be sweet as sugar; because Nature greedily attracts all that is sweet.

If you do not prepare your medicine in this way and remain attached to your sulfur extract, you take the shade for the body. Even if the best philosophers spoke otherwise, I would not listen to them. I will always start from this principle: that Nature never joins heterogeneous together, and consequently that there is no faeces in any subject whatsoever; although many have imagined the contrary, according to this sentence: A nimam extrahe; relinquish corpus .

But I say to you: take the soul together with the body, if you want to heal the human spirit and body. Do not these sorts of people contradict themselves by saying that when the disease is in the blood or in the liquid parts, the soul cures them; and that likewise the body must heal the body, one spirit another, and one body another?

Such people are very condemnable for having introduced such errors into the Art, which are the cause of the ruin of an infinity of people: and unfortunately these false Philosophers are only too common. Someone, after years of work, has only to find, by chance, some manipulation that he could have learned in a quarter of an hour, if fate had not been against him; he praises it as much as if he had concentrated heaven and earth; he exclaims that there is no true method except the one he has practiced and that, when an angel descends from heaven to teach another, it would only be a lie, as if God did not have a thousand ways to help us; he tortures the writings of the Philosophers to make them agree with his work and, charmed by his rare discovery, he hastens to bring it to light,for the love of neighbour. Thus, of a single thing to which they have applied the whole physics, more than one author of this caliber has had the Art of smearing large in-fol . They communicate, under the veil of hieroglyphs, riddles and parables, the greatest secrets, of which the world is not worthy, to privileged souls; and yet for the world, they will add to it a couple of very obscure old recipes for the universal tincture or the philosopher's stone.

To deepen them, many sacrifice their health and fortune; and when one looks at the thing more closely, one often finds this secret in some old book exhibited in public sale: then the secret is out, and no one makes any more of it.

For me, I proposed to write clearly in few words and without detours, so that everyone can hear me and that everyone is animated to make experiments which turn to the advantage of the public.

What is the use of speaking in parables and riddles? I would rather be silent than make men waste their time and money, and thereby deprive them of their necessities, which they already have so much trouble obtaining. Every author who writes books should take heed of it, and rather not write than mislead men, as happens when it is not clear. For I can hear my own riddles; but another cannot penetrate my mind to know how I heard them: this is why each explains them, according to his ideas; and by the number of these different explanations, there arises confusion and errors which cause loss and ruin to those who work. I will have nothing to reproach myself for. The various ways of proceeding in the three kingdoms,I have described them sincerely and without obscurity, and I will say with the same sincerity, touching on universal medicine or the philosopher's stone, that the whole secret consists in reducing metals and minerals to their first matter, by what menstruation one wishes, corrosive or not, mercurial, sulphurous, saline or other, it does not matter, provided that it operates promptly and that by such a menstruation one causes the mineral and the metal to be retrograded into its first saline matter; that is to say, the metal be changed into a saline, vitriolic or aluminous nature, or into a mineral salt which then resolves in vinegar or in rainwater, and which does not deposit any undissolved earth. When there is some left, it is proof that there has not been enough menstruation.concerning universal medicine or the philosopher's stone, that the whole secret consists in reducing metals and minerals to their first matter, by what menstruation one wishes, corrosive or not, mercurial, sulphurous, saline or other, it does not matter, provided that it operates promptly and that by such a menstruation the mineral and the metal are made to retrograde to their first saline matter; that is to say, the metal be changed into a saline, vitriolic or aluminous nature, or into a mineral salt which then resolves in vinegar or in rainwater, and which does not deposit any undissolved earth. When there is some left, it is proof that there has not been enough menstruation.concerning universal medicine or the philosopher's stone, that the whole secret consists in reducing metals and minerals to their first matter, by what menstruation one wishes, corrosive or not, mercurial, sulphurous, saline or other, it does not matter, provided that it operates promptly and that by such a menstruation the mineral and the metal are made to retrograde to their first saline matter; that is to say, the metal be changed into a saline, vitriolic or aluminous nature, or into a mineral salt which then resolves in vinegar or in rainwater, and which does not deposit any undissolved earth. When there is some left, it is proof that there has not been enough menstruation.sulphurous, saline or otherwise, it does not matter, provided that it operates promptly and that by such a menstruation one makes the mineral and the metal retrograde in its first saline matter; that is to say, the metal be changed into a saline, vitriolic or aluminous nature, or into a mineral salt which then resolves in vinegar or in rainwater, and which does not deposit any undissolved earth. When there is some left, it is proof that there has not been enough menstruation. sulphurous, saline or otherwise, it does not matter, provided that it operates promptly and that by such a menstruation the mineral and the metal are made to retrograde into their first saline matter;that is to say, the metal be changed into a saline, vitriolic or aluminous nature, or into a mineral salt which then resolves in vinegar or in rainwater, and which does not deposit any undissolved earth. When there is some left, it is proof that there has not been enough menstruation.

So resolve this earth with again a menstruation, and reduce likewise in salt, vitriol or alum, etc. Dissolve this vitriol, this salt or this alum again in the dulcifying acid which I have taught and in the spirit of wine. Do everything as I said. The more often you dissolve it with new vinegar and new spirit of wine, coagulating it each time to oiliness, the softer and more volatile it will become, and the more it will pass through the distillation like an oil, and in small veins like a spirit-of-wine or another spirit; and after you have dephlegmated it, it will coagulate, settle in a little heat of ashes, will be in the heat fluid like wax, and in the cold condensed like ice; it will melt into all liquors like sugar, without allowing itself to precipitate;it will be pleasant and sweet in taste,

One finds everywhere and in quantity descriptions of simple and compound menses; but I declare to the Reader that he begins where he will, that he will never, without corrosives, or with great difficulty, make a true and good mineral solution. The alkaest and other menses radical mercurials are all and must be drawn from the root of the corrosives.

They may be said to be dulcified by the spirit of wine, etc., but the corrosive is the main part of the thing, and it will be so as long as the world lasts. Cape, if capere homies .

CHAPTER XI AND LAST

Alkaest.

In order for the reader to have a knowledge of the famous alkaest and the very acute, circulating vinegar, I will describe it to him and will end my book there.

In order not to go into too long speeches, I will only say that the Philosophers, after having seen that the corrosives, such as I described them above, could not operate a great effect, sought and found a means to succeed there. If a corrosive alkaline resolves the acid metals, it does not dissolve those which are acid; and the corrosive, which resolves the alkaline subjects, does not dissolve those which are acid; because the acid and the alkali, when joined together, eat each other, and a third thing results. They therefore sought in Nature if they could not find a subject which could dissolve the one as well as the other, both acidic and alkaline subjects, and which produced the same effect in the solution. After reviewing everything,they saw that this subject must be hermaphrodite, and able to embrace both natures. They found it, among others, in mercurial subjects such as are arsenical subjects, marcasites, realgals, after the separation of their combustible sulphurs, and in all flowing and coagulated mercury: they took such mercury and made a choice of it each according to his whim; but most have taken a mercury which specifies itself nearest to the metallic substance, which, in conjunction, attaches itself to it even in the marrow, which remains without alteration even after separation, and which, in coagulation and fixation, is not transmuted into any metal but into gold and silver.the marcasites, the realgals, after the separation of their combustible sulphides, and in all the flowing and coagulated mercurys: they took such mercurys and made a choice of them each according to his whim; but most have taken a mercury which specifies itself nearest to the metallic substance, which, in conjunction, attaches itself to it even in the marrow, which remains without alteration even after separation, and which, in coagulation and fixation, is not transmuted into any metal but into gold and silver. the marcasites, the realgals, after the separation of their combustible sulphides, and in all the flowing and coagulated mercurys: they took such mercurys and made a choice of them each according to his whim;but most have taken a mercury which specifies itself nearest to the metallic substance, which, in conjunction, attaches itself to it even in the marrow, which remains without alteration even after separation, and which, in coagulation and fixation, is not transmuted into any metal but into gold and silver.

As they saw that this mercury was too thick and too weak to reduce metals to their first essence and to render them liquid; that they knew that the metals, to be made homogeneous with all creatures, had to take on a saline, oleaginous or aqueous nature, and that mercury, in its simple nature, could not give this saline nature to metals; that they also saw that no simple water or earth could resolve mercury or metals, nor reduce them to a saline nature; that finally they perceive well that, if they wanted to reduce the metals in salt, in oil or in water, it was necessary beforehand to reduce the mercury in salt or in salted water, so that the like could produce its like; they took, for this reason,such mercury and reduced it in part and in different ways to salt and water, according to the way which succeeded in their experience. The more they acuoit the mercury, the better it dissolves; the less sharp it was, the less, and the more slowly it dissolves; and they saw clearly that, without this nature, the mercury penetrated very little or not at all. They were therefore forced, in order to reduce the mercury into salt and then into water, to have recourse to all the acids, to all the alkalis, and to employ in spite of themselves the corrosives, without which the mercury would not act. But some had a better method than others; some, to acuate the mercury, took animal, vegetable, and mineral salts, according as they succeeded best. SW,they recommended this method with as much warmth as if there were no others in Nature, and as if they were the only ones who had everything; what makes the inversion of Nature. After having reduced the mercury to salt, they felt that Nature made use of water in all generation and corruption, and in all mixtures; and that it made almost no salt compound, for which it did not need water. For this reason, they reduced this saline mercury into water by water, so that, by this means, it could better penetrate the metals and the minerals, and attack them even in their center. So they took this mercury, and reduced it to water with water. The more this water was penetrating, the quicker the mercury attacked the metals;the weaker this water, the slower the solution of mercury. Because of this, some mixed it with mineral waters, others with vegetable, or animal, or universal waters; or they made of all these waters a compound which pushed the mercury from one side to the other, until they had reduced it with them to water. If they made this sharp and spirituous water, it had an effect all the more prompt; if, on the contrary, they left this water coarse, raw, or quite corporeal, so that the mercury did not become spirit with it, their operation was imperfect. Finally, when they had perfectly reduced the mercury into such spiritualized water, they called it, according to its acuteness: A or universal;or they made of all these waters a compound which pushed the mercury from one side to the other, until they had reduced it with them to water. If they made this sharp and spirituous water, it had an effect all the more prompt; if, on the contrary, they left this water coarse, raw, or quite corporeal, so that the mercury did not become spirit with it, their operation was imperfect. Finally, when they had perfectly reduced the mercury into such spiritualized water, they called it, according to its acuteness: A or universal; or they made of all these waters a compound which pushed the mercury from one side to the other, until they had reduced it with them to water. If they made this sharp and spirituous water, it had an effect all the more prompt;if, on the contrary, they left this water coarse, raw, or quite corporeal, so that the mercury did not become spirit with it, their operation was imperfect. Finally, when they had perfectly reduced the mercury into such spiritualized water, they called it, according to its acuteness: A so that the mercury had not become spirit with it, their operation was imperfect. Finally, when they had perfectly reduced the mercury into such spiritualized water, they called it, according to its acuteness: A so that the mercury had not become spirit with it, their operation was imperfect. Finally, when they had perfectly reduced the mercury into such spiritualized water, they called it, according to its acuteness: Acetum acerrimum; acidum metallicum Philosophorum; acherontem infernalem; alkaest; aka etiam circulatum majus .

There are also some who have reduced mercury to water, without salt, only by means of fire; and as this water would not penetrate, they were again compelled to have recourse to salty, penetrating and sharp waters; and they acuated them with mineral, animal and vegetable or universal waters; but some were very timid and scrupulous, and feared that if they used acute mineral waters, the mercury would thereby become corrosive. Thus they only drank it with animal and vegetable waters, with which they carried out their operations according to their success.

If you are looking to compose a period, choose between all these the one that you like best. You will find the processes in various authors with all their manipulations. Read them for your greatest help; these are only periods hidden under different names; you can exercise your mind there.

The strongest reason why Chemists are so unsuccessful is that they abhor corrosives. When they hear about them, they decry them as if they were poisons.

But the most violent poison for these Amateurs is the very contempt they have for corrosives, since it misleads them and engages them in vain labors which shorten their days and cause them to die in poverty and despair. If anyone wants to follow me, first open the mineral locks with a mineral key of the same nature, and attack the minerals with the strongest corrosives; that then he ascends the ladder of Nature from one degree to another, that is to say, from minerals to plants, from there to animals; let him make it a homogeneous animal, vegetable and mineral, by animals, vegetables and minerals. Going about it in this way, he will learn more in an hour than he would learn in his whole life, working without rules and at random, as almost all who devote themselves to Chemistry do.


TABLE OF CHAPTERS

Contained in the second Volume; where it is treated of the Destruction and Analysis of natural things

CHAP. I In what way Nature reduces the chaotic principles, after their alteration in their first matter, namely in nitre, in salt, and how she makes them again become vapors

CHAP. II How Nature Destroys Animals

CHAP. III How Nature destroys plants

CHAP. IV How Nature destroys, corrupts and alters minerals

CHAP. V Of the analysis or separation, conjunction and regeneration of chaotic water and its quintessence

CHAP. VI What can be concluded from the preceding chapters

CHAP. VII Animal Analysis

CHAP. VIII On the analysis of plants

CHAP. IX Of the analysis of minerals

CHAP. X From the Tree of Dulcification

CHAP. XI Of the alkaest; what it is