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12 Nitre and Salt Are Found in All Waters and Earths
Chapter outline
Leaching and crystallization are proposed to reveal nitre and salt in soils and waters.
Rivers carry dissolved salts to the sea.
The predominance of salt in seawater is attributed to continued heating and motion.
Fixation is described as a conversion from nitre toward alkali.
The preceding test shows that nitre and salt can be obtained from rain, snow, frost and so forth. Their presence in every earth and water can be seen in the same manner. Take any soil from the earth’s surface—fields, meadows, marshes, mountains or valleys—dissolve its soluble matter with ordinary distilled or raw well water, filter, evaporate to one third and let it crystallize, proceeding in every respect as with rainwater. You will find much or little nitre and salt according to how strongly the soil is impregnated. No special demonstration is needed: ask the saltpeter boilers, who know it best and can tell enough about it. It is the same with waters and springs. How many springs are found entirely saline and nitrous! With rivers the case is quite clear: they flow through earth, dissolve out salt and nitre, and carry them through every land to the sea. The sea contains more salt than nitre because it is continually irradiated and reverberated by the sun and driven to and fro by winds, remaining in motion. Saltpeter is thereby reverberated; through this unceasing reverberation and movement it loses its fulminating power and becomes an alkali.
If nitre, with its earth still unleached, is repeatedly boiled with water to dryness rather strongly, then broken up and boiled again as before, it will be found to become increasingly fixed, until finally entirely fixed and alkaline and no longer fulminating. Salt is thus nothing other than reverberated or fixed saltpeter. This fixation is made more quickly with quicklime or other earths by the dry way, retaining most of the saltpeter; otherwise, when deflagrated with charcoal dust, much of it flies away through the reaction of the opposing substance. It is fixed still more quickly in fusion by adding an equal amount of common salt or another fixed alkali. It fixes at once. If it is then kept molten and sulphur or charcoal dust applied, it no longer fulminates, but draws some sulphur and charcoal into itself and fixes them too.