Instead, it happens as follows. The plant’s root draws in only the subtlest, most volatile spirits as the clearest, purest water. This passes swiftly through the pores into stalk and leaves, where it is thickened and coagulated by the air; thus the plant’s parts are driven apart, enlarged, and increased. Moreover, if plants drew in water with all its parts, they would attract all the earth’s nourishment at once, leaving nature insufficient time to produce enough more. Yet as all things differ, and no one thing ever entirely resembles another in appearance and action, so it is here. One plant has wider pores than another. Willows and elms draw in more moisture, and stronger moisture, and therefore their health is less constant: they suffer various defects and are always developing mould and rot. The excess of absorbed moisture causes this, especially when they stand by waters and rivers, in damp, marshy places and ditches. Conversely, the vine, juniper bush, fir, oak, and larch have such constricted pores that they absorb little coarse water or phlegm, but only the subtlest vapours together with a plentiful, most subtle spirit. Hence they enjoy a lasting, healthy life not easily impaired, as we see especially in the fir, juniper, and others, which are green in winter and summer and also bear their fruits.

Juicy plants soon lose this virtue and pass into putrefaction. For the drier and more spiritual a thing is, the more lasting and lively it is. Someone might object: if such plants as the fir did not receive moisture in abundance, how could they grow so large? Surely rain and dew would not contain enough spirit to make them so strong. Let the reader observe that such plants commonly grow in high, stony, dry places and mountains. When rain comes, its quantity makes it rush down the mountains; it washes away as much salt and nitre as it can obtain into the depths and ditches, carrying them in streams into the great rivers, which flow again into the sea. This well-salted sea penetrates again to the centre of the earth. From there the water is turned wholly into vapour and rises into the earth’s inward parts. Whatever is heavy settles within the earth, and minerals grow from it. The lighter the vapour, the higher it rises, until it reaches the roots of the plants from which it also proceeded, and becomes their nourishment. Still subtler and more volatile vapours break out into the daylight. Animals draw in part of them through breathing and are nourished by them; another part rises into the air to regenerate the Chaos or chaotic water.

Now observe how wonderfully the fir and its like must be nourished. I have said that the general nourishment of plants is rainwater and dew, earthly nitre and salt, together with subterranean vapours, other incidental animal excrements, and the fallen leaves of each plant. If the fir stands upon stony mountains, rainwater will supply it with poor nourishment, since it immediately runs off again down the mountain’s steepness. Dew alone is too little, and rainwater washes away most of the nitre and salt. Once this is recognized, we must admit that the fir and other mountain plants are maintained chiefly by the unceasing subterranean or mineral vapours, and by dew, though this is little compared with those subterranean vapours. We conclude that the fir, in all its size, is chiefly generated, reared, and nourished by subterranean mineral vapours. It is therefore less subject to decay than other plants of level ground, juicy and marsh-dwelling, for minerals undergo little decay, or do so only extremely slowly. To understand how the fir obtains subterranean spirits and moisture, attend to the following account.

Nature does not stand still for a moment: she works onward without any cessation. We see vapours continually rising from the earth and continually becoming clouds, so that fewer fine days are observed than cloud-filled skies. We see these vapours breaking abundantly from the earth into the air, especially in spring and autumn. If they break abundantly into the air, still more must necessarily remain within the earth; otherwise they would not press upon one another so plentifully. Since the earth is porous, spongy, and full of holes throughout, like the bodies of human beings and all animals, this vapour passes out everywhere, just as plentiful sweat breaks out everywhere on a person, and just as the vital spirit of the macrocosm traverses all wood, earth, and stone. Everything has its pores, and nothing is closed to this spirit, though our sight and understanding may not comprehend it. The fir stands on a mountain containing only sand, pebbles, and stones. These are a magnet and attracting subjects, and a coagulated salt that catches such vapours. Upon them the vapours thicken and become water. That water is very subtle, rich in spirit, and strong; the fir’s roots draw it in and thus obtain their growth. For the earth is as full of vapours and clouds as the air. Just as those vapours become rain and dew in the air, so mineral vapours become water upon stones, which the plants then enjoy.

It is certain that vapours become water upon stones. Dig only a foot deep into the earth where stones lie, and you will find that, even if no river or spring is near, the stones are always moist. This comes from the moist mineral vapours. Simply take a warmed pebble or piece of marble and put it in a damp cellar: immediately you will see drops upon it as if it were sweating, and the longer it stands the moister it becomes. I said earlier that a pebble or stone is a coagulated salt, or salt made into stone. Some will be astonished and say: “Master, that is certainly a lie.” Yet practical operation can easily answer them. Take any salt you choose, melt it, pour it out, dissolve it in water, and filter it: you will find a feeble, weak earth left behind. Coagulate the salt, melt it again, pour it out, dissolve and filter it: you will again have an earth, but will find it white. The more often you fuse the salt, the more earth you will find, and the whiter that earth will become, like snow. Take this earth, give it to a glassmaker, and have it fused together: then you have a stone made from salt. For repeated melting drives off the spirit of salt, while part of it is fixed and transformed into such an earth.

Someone will now say: “These are strange proceedings. Where is nature to get a glassworks or melting crucible in the mountains?” I say the same myself. Yet nature has something equivalent. Just as salt was formerly a vapour and became corporeal and fixed only by successive changes, nature could accomplish this over a long time, and so she accomplishes the other thing as well. The more earth comes to the salt, and the more earthly and mineral saline spirits assist, the earthier the salt becomes. With the water it runs into a thick juice that is neither fluid nor becomes volatile, but grows ever more fixed, until it contracts into a fixed, clear, transparent crystal or pebble, according as that juice is pure or impure. To insert such incidental matters would take too long. Yet they too serve one natural philosopher better than another. It has therefore now been demonstrated how, and in what manner, plants grow.

Now back to our purpose. To produce a complete account—or at least a complete intention and teaching—of nature, we shall explain further how so great a quantity of nitre and salt is generated that growth never lacks them, although plants continually use them for nourishment. Observe the following. It has been demonstrated above that every earth contains salt and nitre, and all waters too, especially where plants seldom grow. For mineral salt and nitre also have their particular place. This nitre and salt is constantly generated from below and above: from dew, rain, air, water, and all manner of incidental materials and excrements made by animals and plants through putrefaction; from below, by the mineral and subterranean vapours that continually breathe out toward the surface. Salt is the magnet and nitre the steel. Nitre is drawn by the salt and, through the reverberation of the warm sun and central heat, is transformed into the salt’s nature, or into salt as well. When such earths are leached, one generally obtains more salt than nitre, and there must naturally be more salt, because the magnet must be greater and stronger than the steel; otherwise it could not attract it.

How nitre and salt are generated from rain, dew, snow, and other waters has been demonstrated above. The reason why nature contains less nitre than salt and produces less of it can be demonstrated by operation. If there were more nitre than salt, the nitre would also make the salt into nitre and turn it into its own nature. Nitre does not attract but acts: it is the agent, and salt is the patient. All plants growing in the earth attract, for they draw nitre, or the universal seed, to themselves very eagerly. After rain falls upon the earth following a long period of sunshine, we see plants draw the volatile nitre from it so eagerly that they have often grown an inch taller in a single night. If there were more nitre than salt, they would likewise draw it violently to themselves and grow excessively, taking all the earth’s seed at once and in a short time, so that nothing but infertility would follow. When that came and the plants had no more nourishment, they would have to wither. As swiftly as they had grown, so swiftly they would perish, according to the axiom: “What comes into being quickly perishes quickly.”

Nitre is a very subtle, spiritual, penetrating salt that plants can digest swiftly through their roots. Salt, however, is more fixed and coarse, and they must digest it more slowly and subtly. Furthermore, salt and its spirit are balsamic: its spirit must preserve everything. Nitre, by contrast, is a volatile salt that corrupts, corrodes, putrefies, and brings about decay, as operation can show. Take pure nitre containing no salt, dissolve it in rainwater, and frequently water an apple or pear tree with it. That year it will bear the finest fruit in such abundance that you will marvel; but wait until the following year and you will scarcely obtain one fruit. Indeed, if the tree is not of a good kind or does not stand in good earth, it will begin gradually to wither. By contrast, as I stated above, melt one part nitre and two parts salt, dissolve them in rainwater, and pour it upon the tree, or steep a seed in it. You will obtain good, splendid, abundant fruit without harm, year after year, if the tree is watered only two or three times in spring.