13 Nitre and Salt Are Found in Animals, Which Are Made From These Two and Resolve Into Them Again

Chapter outline

Animal analysis yields volatile and fixed salts and inflammable oil.

Fertility is linked to a nitrous and saline constitution.

Saltpeter workers and the decay of buried bodies are invoked as evidence.

Return to nitre and salt is taken to show an origin in those principles.

Everything that is to make fertile must be nitrous and saline, or it will do little to manure the peasant’s fields. Sound analysts and chymists know that all animals are nitrous and saline, for their analysis yields a powerful volatile salt, a fixed salt too, and a foul-smelling, inflammable oiliness. The volatile portion immediately proves itself a volatile salt; fixed salt displays itself in the ashes. The oil proves itself a liquid salt by its inflammability, by burning, since nothing burns except saltpeter and what accompanies it: fixed salt and fixed earth do not burn at all. Phosphorus made from the animal kingdom offers a better demonstration. Artisans themselves show us that the animal kingdom is highly nitrous: saltpeter boilers dig up the peasants’ rooms and chambers, where their children continually piss and urinate. This seeps into the earth and changes there into excellent saltpeter. Whoever still disbelieves need only go to a churchyard where many people are buried, take well-rotted earth from a grave, leach it and examine whether the animal kingdom is nitrous. He will find that this kingdom has been reduced into it again; and whatever a thing is reduced into, it must necessarily have originated from. What has been set out sufficiently proves, without requiring many words for any philosopher, that animals are not only born from saltpeter and salt and consist of them, but are dissolved into them again through the universal Archeus of nature, as this treatise will confirm further.