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

Chapter outline

Increasing earthly fixation changes the universal seed’s properties and inflammability.

Saline dissolution is taken to demonstrate minerals’ kinship with salt.

Subterranean vapours are said to condense, corrode rock and generate Gur.

Sulphur, arsenic and marcasite form successive stages toward metallic matter.

The author reconciles nitre and salt with the inherited mercury–sulphur–salt account.

Putrefaction is introduced as the key to generation and destruction.

The nearer heaven comes to earth, the more earthly and bodily it becomes; the more earthly, the more fixed; the more fixed, the less it burns, shines or ignites. Thus nitre descending from heaven lies entirely volatile and invisible within water, but is revealed through putrefaction. The more earthly and fixed it becomes, the more alkaline it becomes, losing increasingly its fulminating power through fixation, as can be seen here in minerals. As it leaves its universal nature, its nature and quality change: one way when specified in the animal kingdom, another in the vegetable, another in the mineral. Yet it demonstrates its fiery dominion in them all, much or little according to its degree of fixation or volatility. In the animal and vegetable kingdoms it does so in coarse and subtle oiliness, resin, pitch and the like; in the mineral kingdom in sulphurous things such as sulphur, naphtha and petroleum. Because minerals are stony in kind and advance increasingly toward fixation, inflammable sulphur is deprived of its inflammability through continual fixation and reaches another degree, an incombustible one. We showed above that sulphur and similar inflammable things are nitrous, since all ignition arises from saltpeter and what accompanies it. Minerals also contain a salt: this is seen by leaching them with water after gently glowing them. The reason salt is no longer perceived in the same quantity in salt’s own form is that it becomes increasingly earthly and takes more earth into itself. The more earth it dissolves, the more earthly it becomes and the farther it departs from its salt-form. The axiom cannot be turned aside, and practice shows almost every chymist daily: what a thing is made from, and through what it is made, it dissolves into again.

We see that to loosen these tightly bound minerals from one another we must use salt or saline and nitrous menstrua. Without them the minerals will not and cannot open. Every chymist knows that all menstrua are saline or nitrous. Since minerals melt and dissolve in salt or a saline menstruum, the reader can conclude that they must share a homogeneity with salt, or they could not be compelled to melt into a liquid in such a menstruum. They are made from water or saltwater and resolve into it again. If the remaining wateriness is abstracted to one third, every chymist makes a salt or vitriol from it. Through cohobation in distillation, this vitriol can be distilled entirely into a saline water or spirit, from which the minerals were previously born through successive alterations. In sum, minerals are born from soured, fermented or decayed and putrefied salt and nitre, which dissolves an earth within itself and thereby becomes vitriolic—“Sulphur Opl.,” and so forth—and is then increasingly fixed through its degrees. As they are born from soured spiritual nitre and salt, so by such soured nitre they are brought back to the first state, as will be explained further in the generation of minerals.

To be of some service to the reader here, although this belongs to the genealogy of minerals, we shall go a little further. If it pleases him, he will not regret reading it or having read it: repeated things will give pleasure. We shall also confirm the account by upper and lower things. Minerals are born from the nitrous, liquefied water that flows everywhere through earth’s cracks and fissures toward its centre. This saline water is strongly heated and fermented, then driven as vapour, a pure spirit, toward earth’s circumference. Through the repelling cold of the mountains these vapours strike the rocks and resolve into water. Carrying a spiritual salt, a spirit of salt and nitre, this water gnaws, eats away and corrodes. If it were not corrosive, how could it attack and dissolve rock? It therefore dissolves rocks and earths. Earth coagulates the water into salt again, but not as before: into a vitriolic salt. Whatever it takes hold of at once it grinds finely into a subtle, greasy, fatty earth, commonly called Gur. The corrosive vapours continually rising afterward dissolve this Gur further, until it becomes so full of corrosive matter that it changes into a sulphur. The more corrosive matter it receives, the more sulphurous it becomes. Through time and central warmth this sulphur is brought beyond combustibility and changes into an arsenic; arsenic changes into a marcasite. That, and not vitriol, is the first proximate matter toward metallic being.

That sulphur is wholly corrosive is shown first by its smell: more than aqua fortis, aqua regia, spirit of vitriol or oil of vitriol, it so chokes the lungs that a person can scarcely catch breath. Second, by its oil, distilled abundantly both under a bell and from its ore in the usual manner. Third, that it acts on “its bone” [unclear verb], corrodes and burns it as liquid corrosives do. Oil and spirit of vitriol are seen to be dissolved sulphur: if an earth such as chalk or another fixed earth is imbibed with them and allowed to smoke strongly over an open fire, it will ignite and burn like sulphur. I have just recounted from sulphur’s origin that it was a salt. I also taught above that these resolve again into fermented or soured saltpeter or vitriol, and the latter into the very first being. This will be illustrated further below in its own chapter. From this the reader can judge whether I correctly understand their origin. Let him proceed forward or backward into the analysis of minerals, and he will see what he did not believe before.

If he thinks I wish to teach the world something different and overturn the ancient fathers, who for so many thousands of years have written, “Mercury, sulphur and salt are the first matter of metals,” I reply: I have no wish to overthrow the ancient fathers. That they name mercury, sulphur and salt as metals’ first matter is well known to the present world; but the philosophers who know the ground understand whether those words should be understood in that manner. It is evident that sulphur and mercury are themselves born from nitre and salt. The more earth acquires saltpeter or corrosive matter, an acid, the more it becomes sulphur. The more it becomes alkaline or saline, or reaches an alkaline, saline place that kills the corrosive or sulphur, the more it becomes mercury or a mercurial substance. From what has been said it is clear as sunlight that saltpeter and salt are the seed of the whole great world, volatile and fixed. The visible elements—air, water and earth—are their house or dwelling and matrix, and so forth. Minerals are born from a thick, sour vapour and subterranean air that, through the heat of the abyss, sublimes from the central water into the mountains’ inward parts and becomes water there. In all this air and water saltpeter and salt lie hidden as a sperm. We shall therefore properly begin next at nature’s principal gate, the key and author of the generation and destruction of every thing, without which we could scarcely reach nature’s ground. This key and chief point of the chymists is called putrefaction.