Conversely, take little earth and enough acid and volatile to dissolve the earth completely. Through acid and volatile, earth will become an acid. Now add a sufficient quantity of volatile to this acid, and the excess volatile will make the acid volatile. Whatever exceeds in quantity and power has the ability to transform the other into itself. Thus take 1 part aqua fortis, 4 or 6 parts acid, and 8 parts spirit of wine, or 12 parts. Do everything as above and you will see an experiment contrary to the earlier one: you will have changed earth into an acid. If you cohobate the volatile several times, the acid will change into a volatile. This is the other experiment, through which the student can exercise himself in material work and see and experience with his own eyes that nature works among universals as she does among particulars. She always maintains this order, until the melting of the earth’s surface. Through it she makes specifics and individuals from universals according to which principles predominate. One has too much volatile, another too much alkali, a third too much acid: too much in one, too little in another, or a thoroughly middling proportion in some. According to these differences of more and less they take on a quality, and establish or acquire a difference from the others. All creatures differ, as already said, by having more or less volatile, acid and alkali, or by greater and lesser volatility and fixation.

Someone might object: why does he choose such strange and contrary things and subjects for his experiment, drawn from the vegetable and mineral kingdoms? Why not demonstrate it with rainwater, as he began? I reply that I have already given sufficient occasion and experiment above. The present experiment is intended to assure the student of the promised rapid operation. Not everyone wishes to put the preceding discussion of rainwater into practice; through so quick an experiment he can swiftly recognize and grasp with his hands how the volatile becomes acid, and acid alkali. Nor is the novice bound to the example above. He can perform it with any and every subject throughout nature that has the three principles properly complete and actually in an open condition: with all animals and vegetables. With minerals this experiment will be difficult for him. Yet if he reads through this treatise he will readily grasp that too. Let him take a thing’s volatile, its acid, and its alkali or earthen ashes and proceed in the manner above: he will achieve it.

One might say further: very well, to make a quick experiment one may incidentally combine several subjects; but why add vinegar? Are spirit of wine as the volatile, aqua fortis as the acid, and chalk as a fixed earth and alkaline subject not enough? Why add acid? A fundamental discussion fits very well here, and is most necessary. It will kindle no small light for students hitherto trapped in the labyrinth, enabling them to correct the many thousands of errors they have made. This is a practical manipulation which, properly applied, would save many people much roundabout labour, expense and time in chymistry. It has become a trade practice for every laboratory worker to wash his hands in spirit of wine, although scarcely one in a hundred knows what it is. They say spirit of wine must extract the sulphurs, sweeten corrosives, clarify salts, and, as the noblest essence, correct and perfect the whole work. Yes, they are right. But take note: here lies the kernel. Tell me the reason why spirit of wine does this! When many people look at their work in the end, they see it crippled and imperfect, and wish they had never begun. They have wasted so many measures of costly spirit of wine and obtained not the slightest effect. The spirit was sharp enough to ignite powder, yet produced this poor effect. What is the cause?

This is it, the reason for the error: there is no passage from one extreme to the other. Spirit of wine is a supremely volatile being; aqua fortis, salts and earths have a more fixed nature and are therefore contrary to the oil and spirit of wine. They are an extreme. It will consequently not readily unite and become like them without resistance. Pour them together and one immediately hears a contrary action: spirit of wine and aqua fortis, especially when strong, hiss audibly together because they are contrary to one another. But if vinegar intervenes, as the acid suitable to spirit of wine and its proper medium, spirit of wine unites most readily, without the least resistance. Vinegar is not contrary to aqua fortis either. Their union shows this: they mix like water with water, without the least resistance. Vinegar takes spirit of wine into itself and coagulates it most amicably with aqua fortis, so that they lose all sharpness and acquire sweetness instead. One might object that this makes volatile, acid and alkali easy to produce: I merely overload one with another, adding all sorts of things and using all sorts of subjects of different kinds. Spirit of wine and vinegar are vegetable, aqua fortis mineral, as is chalk; such contrary subjects must necessarily produce a change. First, I reply that I proceed according to nature’s own law, as this treatise will clearly explain in several appropriate places. Whoever did not know this procedure should now thank me for teaching him a medium of conjunction. He should mark, here and everywhere, the philosophical axiom indispensable in chymical operations: one cannot pass from one extreme to the other, and so forth.

To explain this more fully here would take too long. A practitioner, however, is better served by physical reasons and authentic practice than by being presented with innumerable speculations, ambiguities and hieroglyphs. From a sound reason and practice once grasped, a thousand further arguments arise that one had never considered before. From one light one kindles many hundreds of other lights in the mind, and is led ever closer to truth’s goal. Many books of processes are written, and other theoretical works too, but none, or very few, have appeared that explain why this or that is added in a particular process, what fixes and what makes volatile, what coagulates or dissolves, and why and through what power this happens. When an innocent novice stumbles upon such processes he enters blindly, until at the end he sees the great error. He can then find no way to help himself, because he cannot fathom its cause. But if the learned world illustrated its books with true reasons that also agreed with practice, even in the smallest possible detail, we would soon gaze in astonishment upon a miraculous new birth of our young people. They would no longer have such difficulty sowing wider fields and bringing the art to its highest point.

Now to the point. Everyone should note that no subject exists in nature without its principles, whether hidden or manifest, universal or individual. If it lacks a principle, it can have recourse to something homogeneous and like itself, or to universal subjects. These are potentially individuals, associate with all individuals, become like them and change into them, just as individuals are universal in respect of their origin, and change into universals in their final resolution. Since everything has its principles, or a missing one can be replaced by a homogeneous substance, each has a volatile, an acid and an alkali. Of these three, acid is the medium, or means of conjunction, in everything. It is also certain that like readily unites with like in all things. Alkaline salts, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, readily mix together; so do acids, and so do volatiles. Spirit of wine, or the burning spirit of vegetables, and the volatile animal spirit readily unite, as do their middle spirits—acid or vinegar—and their alkalis. Conversely, vegetable and homogeneous vinegar or acid unites without resistance with mineral acids, such as aqua fortis, nitre, salt, vitriol, alum and sulphur, through their fixed salt.

Conversely, one extreme never accommodates itself to the other with its salt or alkali. Thus spirit of wine does not unite with mineral acids and alkalis, or only with great difficulty and danger, and very slowly. But once its medium is supplied they are together immediately, in an instant, so that neither fire nor water can separate them without damage. Add rectified vinegar to rectified spirit of wine and you will immediately see the two unite without resistance. Then give them alkali: it dissolves and unites most gently, so that the two, or all three, stand in their proper weight. Should you try to separate spirit of wine or vinegar from them in a water bath, you will separate only tasteless phlegm in their place, even if they had been most sharply freed of all phlegm. The being or essence of spirit of wine, or its volatile salt, has been fixed upon the alkali through vinegar and its sharpness. After removal of the wateriness you will find a volatile fixed salt, like wax without smoke. Spirit of wine and vinegar have become so fixed through their alkaline salt that they flow like wax in an open crucible without smoke.

To illustrate theory with practice, note the following. By the same reasoning I must expose a principal error committed by almost every common chymist. When chymists wish to sharpen spirit of wine, they habitually sharpen it with salt of tartar or calcined tartar. I now ask a practitioner: does he think he follows nature’s rule this way? Certainly not. The reason, as said above, is that alkali or salt of tartar is a fixed body, an extreme, while spirit of wine is a supreme volatile and also an extreme. They can see directly that an intermediate thing is missing: spirit of wine does not mix with alkali, but the two stand one above the other as though they had never belonged together. Spirit of wine does not unite with alkali, or only so slowly that considerable expense and time disappear in the process. Through numerous cohobations and repetitions spirit of wine may indeed either fix itself upon alkali or make alkali volatile—but with what Herculean labour! It is better to follow nature herself. Since I see that these two accommodate themselves with great difficulty or not at all, I must, take note, seek their own medium, which has been removed from them. Once this medium is obtained, conjunction occurs most gently all at once: inseparably in an instant.