Therefore take a well-dephlegmated aqua fortis, spirit of nitre, salt, or sulphur, or one of their oils, and pour upon it most highly rectified or alkalized spirit of wine—but cautiously, so that you do not fall into danger. Two extraordinary fires meet, especially spirit of wine and oil of nitre (vitriol). You will see that the spirit of wine will by no means unite, but that they stand one above the other like water and oil, hissing and singing together like adders and weasels. Even if they do unite, they must be circulated and digested for an irksomely long time, and still the corrosive will not readily receive spirit of wine. Anyone can experience this by the stated trial. Consider wine or spirit of wine itself, and the contrary principles it has received. An acid of the same kind must be taken for such a fixed acid, rather than immediately the highest part, spirit of wine. Distil the burning spirit from wine, together with all the coarse phlegm, until a honey-like thickness remains. Drive this through a retort and you will obtain a genuinely sharp vinegar or acid, already more fixed than the spirit of wine that preceded it. Pour this acid upon a corrosive spirit and observe their rapid conjunction; afterward add spirit of wine and consider their pleasant union.

Since not everyone willingly risks wine to make vinegar from it, especially in a small quantity, I shall do him the favour—while we are still in the vegetable chapter—of teaching how to make good vinegar quickly and in quantity. Namely: in autumn or a little earlier, take unripe grapes, stalks and all, and crush them to juice in a stone mortar. Put that juice into a glass dish or glazed vessel, set it in the sun or by a warm oven, and let it dry out completely until it is entirely dry. You can make as much of this juice as you wish. Do not remove the stalks; dry the juice together with them. Pour the following wine upon the dried juice. Take the poorest, sourest wine, put it in a still, and distil all its spirit of wine from it. Pour the remainder upon the dried grapes in a cask as follows. Have an oak or birch cask made holding ten or twenty measures. Fill it with the dried grapes, or at least half fill it, then pour on the wine from which the spirit has been distilled. Set it in a warm place or in the sun. When after some days the wine smells very sour, draw it off through the tap and pour on more wine similarly deprived of its spirit; set it again in a warm place or in the sun, and so forth.

You can continue this pouring on and drawing off for as long as you live, needing no fresh grapes: they settle into a mother and become a perpetual ferment, rapidly turning wine into vinegar. Many people make vinegar but do not know the reason for vinegar-making. Wine becomes vinegar partly because warmth lets its volatile spirit of wine escape and partly because that spirit is fixed and altered. As long as it remains unaltered, no vinegar results. To let you make vinegar quickly and obtain a double benefit, I have therefore taught you first to distil off the spirit of wine, which would otherwise be lost. Then you can use it too. Be thankful for the art: a simple manipulation can help many a person greatly. From this the lover of the art sees that vinegar, or wine’s acid, is a middle nature between spirit of wine and a corrosive. Very few consider this; I have neither read, seen, nor heard it from any practitioner. Once the corrosive has first been united with the middle and afterward with spirit of wine, the reader will immediately perceive a sweetness and mildness, making it much more agreeable to human nature than before. It also remains a liquid, volatile, agreeable spirit that distils very pleasantly and, through distillation, is increasingly united, sweetened, or ennobled.

There is another way to kill corrosives so that they entirely lose their consuming nature, but it is neither sweet nor pleasant and is far inferior to the foregoing method. I shall set it down for comparison. Take alkali of wine—that is, the salt leached from wine’s dead head—as a lye, or take another alkali that is pure, white, and clear. Put it in a flask and pour upon it three or six times as much most highly rectified spirit of wine. Then add any corrosive you choose, drop by drop; it will hiss and effervesce. Continue until it no longer effervesces. Then draw off all the moisture in a bath, which will be nothing but tasteless phlegm, since the spirit of wine has become fixed. At the bottom you will find a salt that has killed and fixed the corrosive, so that, according to this account, it can be taken into the body without harm. Yet it is far inferior to the entirely spiritual method above. Here the reader again sees a middle: a means of joining corrosives and sweetening acids through alkalis. It is somewhat violent, as its great effervescence shows, and less pleasant than the earlier method, where they mix wholly gently, like water with water.

Vinegar is related at the root both to spirit of wine and to the corrosive: its sharpness and sourness show that it carries a mineral homogeneity and acidity. It is the middle that follows immediately after spirit of wine in anatomy. We count the phlegmatic portions as recolacta, since the spirit employs them only as an instrument of action and takes no more than it needs for assistance, as the rectification of the parts shows. Therefore observe this. Take sharp, strong distilled wine vinegar: the sharper it is, the sooner and better it sweetens. Take three parts of it and one part corrosive and pour them together. Then slowly pour in four or six parts spirit of wine. You will see a noble conjunction, as they come together most pleasantly. In this way all corrosive precipitates and calcined substances can also be edulcorated. First pour on two-thirds vinegar and draw it off two or three times; only afterward draw spirit of wine off in the same manner. If the corrosive has not been sufficiently killed and the vinegar and wine spirit were too weak, pour on fresh material and repeat until saturation. Mark well: the stronger and sharper the vinegar and spirit of wine, the sooner and faster they sweeten. Yet alone they do this much less perfectly—very, very far less—than when they have entered friendship and copulation with the animal kingdom. I shall faithfully disclose this in my practical account of the corruption of things, or anatomy of nature, in the second book, for love of my neighbour and the poor sick.

I must add one further point and cannot pass it over, since I see all physicians accustomed to using the “sweet stone” as a high medicine in nearly every desperate disease, although it is sometimes administered very dangerously. I shall give them an excellent correction on which they may rely. Take this vinegar and spirit of wine specially prepared, as I shall teach in the relevant chapter on sweetening minerals in the second book. With it dissolve the sweet stone completely, filter, and draw it off very slowly in the water bath, as much as you can. Repeat, and coagulate to an oil, always in the water bath. Then take the spirit of wine mentioned in that same chapter and pour on four parts; draw it off very gently in the water bath, pour on another four parts of fresh spirit, and draw it off again. Do this a third time. You may then leave it as an oil or coagulate it into a sweet salt or powder. One grain of it will operate better and be safer to use than one drachm previously, as practice will teach. To conclude this, I advise every true and faithful practitioner who wishes to learn hidden secrets to beware, as he loves his soul and life, of the great and rich, whatever their name and fame. They disregard the lowly and resemble sucking bees, seeking everywhere to suck out honey while leaving poison in a person’s heart. They promise great golden mountains until they have coaxed the sweat from a poor, persecuted person; once they have it, they no longer regard the one who dealt faithfully with them.

They therefore receive their due when they are repeatedly deceived and learn what labour and sweat a person anxiously devoted to the art must endure. May avarice and envy disturb the house of one who imagines that immovable forests and mountains should bow and humble themselves before his presence. Therefore, you who catch a useful manipulation from these writings, laugh quietly to yourself and enjoy it in the fear of God and in your neighbour’s service, in still, gentle peace. Let the great men run their course and blacken themselves still deeper among the coals, until they recognize that the farmer, as much as they, sprang from one and the same God. The highest pride must be fixed with the greatest misery, through distress and cares as a middle, so that pride may learn what lowly and forced humility are. Let such a person therefore be patient in every way, for after the clouds comes Phoebus. God himself will provide means and ways by which he may at last enjoy his blessing; if he does not obtain it awake in daylight, he will obtain it asleep. So it also happened to me, a poor persecuted husbandman and farmer: I, a lowly tamarisk—praise be to God—now laugh at the lofty cedars, shaken this way and that by every wind.