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18 What Arises and Is Brought About Through Putrefaction
Chapter outline
Putrefaction changes the volatile into acid and then alkali, and can reverse the sequence.
The implanted spirit’s motion produces warmth, separation and earthy deposit.
Three essential fractions remain above a residue called feces.
Odour is associated chiefly with volatile parts, as animal and mineral examples illustrate.
In general, through putrefaction the volatile becomes an acid, and the acid an alkali; and conversely, as nature or art disposes. See the example given above in rainwater. The cause of this breaking down of water, its putrefactive impurity and turbidity, is the implanted spirit. Through continual movement it introduces an imperceptible warmth into the water. The longer it works, the more it heats itself and the greater the separation becomes: day by day one finds more impurity or earth, together with a putrid smell or stench. Let us now examine this putrefied watery body and inspect its parts. After putrefaction it divides into three essential parts: a volatile water; an acid, nitre; and an alkaline salt. After their separation they leave beneath them an earth that chymists call feces. Stench comes from the volatile through heat, as does pleasant smell. This is clearly seen in putrefied urine and its stench during distillation: its volatile salt rises first and stinks more strongly than the more fixed spirit and oil that follow. The charcoal, or dead head burned to charcoal, and its alkali have almost no smell. The same is seen with minerals. When their ore is put into fire, the volatile—sulphur and acid—immediately strikes the nose, and the arsenical spirit makes the head dull. The remaining parts have almost no smell except what fire has fixed into them from the volatile. Acid or nitre has little or almost no smell when made from putrefied rainwater, as does salt or alkali. We shall now transform these three terms into one another and examine how the change takes place: how the volatile becomes acid, acid alkali, and conversely.