23 What the Generation of Minerals Is and Which Principles Constitute Them

Chapter outline

The mineral tree and the value of comparing authorities

Universal nitre and salt and the generation of subterranean vapours

The dissolution of earth and successive formation of Gur sulphur arsenic marcasite and metals

Differences in ores stones and metals according to earth heat and digestion

Experiments and analogies concerning maturation fixation and metallic generation

The relation of mineral principles to the general cycle of nature

Tree of mineral generation. 1. Spirit of nitre and salt with earth to be dissolved; thence 2. vitriol, thence Gur; thence 3. sulphur; thence 4. arsenic; thence 5. white and red marcasite, antimony, bismuth; thence 6. metal; thence, improperly, in the final stage, 7. it becomes glass.

No one should be surprised that I shall not discuss the customary principles; nevertheless, mercury, sulphur, and salt are to be understood here too, as are volatile, acid, and alkali; soul, body, and spirit; heaven, air, water, and earth. In describing mineral generation, I already know that many a reader, within his own limits, will throw great obstacles in the way. Yet once he knows nature and its origin, progress, and end, he will reflect a little and consider the matter further. Let the reader believe and reason with confidence that I follow nature itself and its order, without departing by a single footstep. Many authors have published their mineralogical descriptions for the world’s benefit, some clear and some obscure, according to their conception and their ability to make the world understand it. I despise none of them, but value them, having received much good and many a light from them where otherwise I would have remained stuck. Books are not written so that one should drag this author or that through the hackle, or reject him altogether. No: all who have written books have intended the world’s good. Yet this does not mean that one must remain with a particular author’s sentiment and opinion. By bringing together learned people’s differing judgments, one learns and sometimes recognizes the aim and point about which one has doubted for many years.

Many councillors are admitted to a council: what does not occur to one occurs to another. So too, authors considered together explain nature, one better than another. Even when someone has done his work well, he has not known everything, described every circumstance, or thought of everything, since other thoughts occur every minute. What one author omits, another describes and explains; one illuminates the other. From them the reader corrects himself and recognizes an aim previously overlooked. Let him treat this writing of mine in the same way. If he dislikes one point, let another please him: there will be something in it worth the paper. If I lack a good theory, I nevertheless have good practice or other useful manipulations that will serve many people very well.

Before proceeding, I must state that many philosophers describe the origin of metals in these words: “Vapours ascend from the centre of the earth. Rising to the cold fibres of the mountains, they are there resolved into water and adhere. By dissolving earth they are changed into a muddy saline, or aluminous and saline, matter; from there they are cooked into sulphur and metals according to the variety of the subtle earth.” That is, they say: vapours rise from the earth’s centre into the inward recesses of cracks and clefts in the rocks, settle there, and become water. By dissolving earth, that water makes it subtle, producing a saline or aluminous mixture. From there they become metallic, forming the appearance of metals according to the subtle or coarse earth mixed with them. They rightly state that vapours rise, but do not explain what vapours these are, their origin, or their quality and properties. Such descriptions afford a student little help. Vapours also rise into the air around us, but only those who have gained real experience in the stomach of the great Demogorgon know how far they differ from those within the earth that remain there.

Therefore, dear reader, if you wish to learn something about this, observe, consider, and practise what follows. As I mentioned above, the universal seed of all things was in the beginning water and spirit. This appears not only there but also in the regenerated Chaos, where we showed how that spirit emerges from invisibility and incomprehensibility. Just as everything sprang from nothing, that nothing or vapour became water in which spirit lay hidden. From it all animals, plants, and minerals subsequently grew: the first two from a volatile seed, the last from a more fixed one. In primordial chaotic water as well as regenerated water, and in all waters and earths, one finds at their centre or innermost part two distinct salts: the world-spirit made visible, or the corporeal seed of the macrocosm, masculine and feminine, nitre and salt. We have established these as the universal first matter of all sublunary things, not yet specified or individuated. Together with regenerated Chaos they are all in all, as has been proved by finding them in every subject, volatile or fixed according to the difference in digestion. The trial that follows also confirms that they are all in all.

A thing that is, and is to be, all in all must contain the nature and property of every thing. It must be able without distinction to unite, associate, copulate, and conjoin with all things. These two salts, nitre and salt, are considered mineral according to the common opinion of chymists, but wrongly. Their being dug from mountains, in and under the earth, does not prove that they are therefore mineral. They are also found in the sea, lakes, other waters upon the earth, and the vegetable kingdom, as demonstrated above. By that reasoning, when they occur in or are extracted from animals they would have to be animal; when found in plants, they would therefore be vegetable. Rather, trial and effect show that they occur in all three kingdoms and all universal subjects. Furthermore, throughout the mineral kingdom no salt or subject except these two is homogeneous with the animal or vegetable kingdom without transmutation, and produces no evident alteration in animals, humans, or plants as nitre and salt do. Humans and all animals can receive nitre and salt; plants can receive them; minerals can receive them without harm—provided that degree, weight, and measure are observed, since every excess turns into a fault.

These salts, nitre and salt, are supremely generative and preservative; but when they act contrariwise, they destroy all things. Contrast vitriol and alum, both counted among properly mineral salts. A person cannot receive them without aversion and great alteration as he can the former, nor can he receive mercurial or arsenical subjects; plants cannot either, for they perish from them. Give a person or animal, a dog or cat, only one or two scruples of vitriol and see whether it does not vomit with great distress or suffer alteration. Similarly, pour such a lye of vitriol and alum upon a tree or herb and see whether it does not perish. From this it again appears that the aforesaid nitre and salt are homogeneous with all subterranean creatures. What is homogeneous belongs to their nature; that of their nature is what constitutes them, from which they grow and by which they are maintained. That from which they grow and are maintained is also what they sprang from. What they originally sprang from is their first matter. First matter is the beginning and origin of each thing, into which every creature must again be dissolved through resolutions, so that the last comes from the first and the first again from the last. Yet nitre and salt are differently disposed toward animality, vegetability, and minerality: if they had the same disposition, they would be the same thing.

The disposition of animals and plants has been indicated in their own chapters. Here we shall depict that of minerals. Minerals are nothing other than, and have grown and sprung from nothing other than, a sour, acidic, or corrosive vapour—or more clearly, from strongly fermented and soured nitre and salt, together with an earth subtly dissolved by them. The subtler these acids make the earth, and the earthier and more fixed the salts—that is, those acids—become through the earth, the purer the metal they produce. All natural philosophers know that animals, plants, and minerals are internally salted, their salts being more fixed or volatile according to the nature of each genus and species. Air too is known to be nitrous and salty; the sea and all waters are salted; the earth is salted within and without. With these things established, a natural philosopher will grant that if the parts of the microcosm at the circumference contain little or much salt, the macrocosm’s centre is still saltier, since, as demonstrated, salts—especially the fixed ones—are also abundantly born and generated in part from the vapours of the centre.

One will also admit that the earth’s centre is not a crystal-clear spring containing nothing but pure liquor of life. We see chasms of earth and waters through which every kind of refuse flows toward the centre, just as pure and impure, sweet and sour foods enter the stomachs of people and other animals, and reach plants’ roots. With the help of the salts, this chaotic mixture or confused cesspool will excite a fermentation. The more strongly the centre ferments, the more strongly it fumes and vaporizes. These vapours are carried through the earth’s interior from centre to circumference. There the thickest, strongest, or most fixed settle within the earth upon the walls of rocks, earths, and stones and become water. The more volatile rise to the earth’s surface and the roots of plants; the still more volatile break into the air and reach animals. The most volatile of all rise high into the air, make mists and clouds, and these make rain, dew, and so forth. These vapours are salted because the centre is salted. Through its fermentation and heating, the dissolved salts rise with the water in the form of vapour. The nearer these vapours are to the centre, the sharper and more corrosive they are; the farther away they travel, the more tempered and mild they become, depositing most of their more fixed corrosive as they pass through earth and rocks.