After this the more fire-resistant portions remain at the retort’s bottom, in greater or smaller quantity according as the subject was more fixed or volatile. Examine everything that passed over or rose, and what remained below. You will find: (a) in the receiver, superfluous moisture mixed with the corrosive, a sulphurous, nitrous, or salty liquor, dried, coagulated, and fixed to a greater or lesser degree—in a word, spirit of vitriol. (b) At the entrance or beginning of the neck are flowers. The first are entirely volatile. Test them on a coal: if they burn like sulphur and stink of sulphur, they are called sulphur; if they do not burn, but melt and give an arsenical smell, call them volatile arsenic. (c) Beyond the neck’s midpoint are flowers somewhat more fixed than the first: these are fixed arsenic. (d) At the beginning of the retort’s belly, or its upper interior, other flowers have sublimed, still more fixed than the preceding ones. These are called volatile marcasite, or marcasitically fixed arsenic. The more fixed sulphur and arsenic become, the more they lose their first name and acquire another. Vitriol is called sulphur; sulphur is called arsenic; arsenic, marcasite; and marcasite, metal. They acquire this distinction as they become increasingly fixed.

(e) At the bottom of the retort lies a threefold body: (f) first, the more fixed marcasite, nearest to metallic nature, from which metal immediately arises; (g) second, the grain of metal that has come from the marcasite; (h) third, the stony matrix in which the metal grew and became fixed, as in the great philosophical vessel or glass. The great smelting fire turns that matrix into glass or slag. (i) This last part also contains a fixed salt that can be leached with water and serve as the mineral alkali, concentrated or fixed by fire from the vitriolic spirit that passed over. It is small in quantity, though according to whether the subject contained much or little moisture. Take this last part from the retort’s bottom, first leach out its salt with water, and dry the powder. Melt the powder with a strong fire: a regulus will settle, with slag above. Boil the regulus with lead and blow it off as metals are ordinarily refined; you will find the grain of metal. Although the regulus withstands the melting fire better than its preceding parts, the fire’s ultimate force must nevertheless drive it away. This regulus is the more fixed marcasite and the mercurial, alkalized portion, or fixed and alkalized vitriolic acid. It is the first immediate matter of metal, from which metals arise immediately through long fixation.

This practice is not to be understood as applying completely to every metal, but chiefly to gold, silver, and copper ores, which can be refined through the highest fire according to their degree of fixity and strong alkalization. That is, as vitriolic acid becomes increasingly fixed, it becomes more alkalized and so strongly mixed with earth that not the least acid is perceptible, as in the most highly refined gold. I call that alkalized because no acid can overcome it unless the alkalized gold is awakened by its like, a marcasitic, arsenical, or saline alkali. Then, and not otherwise, sulphurous, vitriolic, or nitrous acid can make it acid again. From this the reader sees the construction and anatomy of metal or ore and should arrange his examinations accordingly, rather than immediately assailing it with bare fire and driving away the vitriolic, sulphurous, and arsenical parts, which are the ore’s spirits of life and nourishment. The reader or lover of the art also sees how beautifully nature proceeds through middle degrees here, as in the animal and vegetable kingdoms: from fiery volatile parts increasingly toward more fixed ones, up to the most fixed and the hardest dry parts.

Now consider the metal forced out through so many procedures, still only slightly permanent, and how little it is compared with the parts separated from it. One learns that metal is only the ninth part, and in so small a quantity that the preceding adherent parts outweigh it a hundredfold. We see how little fine gold and silver a hundredweight of gold and silver ore yields—scarcely a few lots—while much of the surplus becomes smoke and slag. Consider how long nature must spend in digestion when cooking even an inferior metal from the stated kinds according to their greater or lesser amounts, much less when perfect metals are in its work. Every practitioner sees how many stages are needed from volatile vapours or vitriolic Gur, first merely to the more fixed marcasitic nature and then to the metallic, let alone the best generation. Yet each and all is born only from salt, or the double salt, nitre and salt—that is, from their spirits and earths and stones. Through such degrees nature proceeds from one extreme to the other in the finest order, in all creatures and individuals as in these. First she makes the softest, then increasingly hardens it to its perfection in bone, wood, metal, and stone, as sufficiently explained. I should describe the constitution and nature of each metal separately, but from what has been said everyone can test himself and exercise his brain. Knowing the general constitution, he will find the particular too.

Yet I shall give him a rule by which he can immediately recognize whether any metal or mineral has superfluous moisture: whether it is highly fixed or not, of an intermediate or still acidic nature; which metal is acidic, which alkaline, and which partakes of both. Take any ore, universal subject, or metallic star, and with it a corrosive acid and an alkaline corrosive. We recommend these above all, and universally: spirit of nitre or aqua fortis, and spirit of salt. Whatever spirit of nitre and aqua fortis dissolve, judge its acid to be still open, not fixed and alkalized, as is seen with silver and lead. For like dissolves its like. Whatever metal or mineral cannot be dissolved by that acid but can by the alkaline mixed with acid, regard it as alkaline-fixed. Judge that its acid is fully alkalized and fixed, so that it must be awakened by its like, a spiritual alkali, and adapted to the acidic nature. The acid can then transfer that opened material into its own nature and bring it back, as it were, to the first nature and matter of vitriol. Gold and tin are examples.

An ore or metal dissolved by acid as well as alkali should be called a hermaphrodite. It has begun to become alkalized or fixed but remained arrested: fixed and not fixed, alkaline and not alkaline, or acidic. Thus both menstruums can attack and dissolve it, together or separately. Examples are iron, copper, and mercury. Tin would also readily yield, but alkali dissolves it more willingly. Lead likewise comes apart in spirit of salt or aqua regia, but aqua fortis dissolves it completely into water. Someone will now ask: “Am I to regard silver and lead as sulphurous, because acid is compared with sulphur, although they are mercurial? And must I regard gold and tin as mercurial, although they are chiefly sulphurous?” I answer: let him be satisfied with what his eyes show him, which his brain will more readily believe. As for what hangs on speculation alone, let others tickle themselves with it and weary their understanding until they change their minds.

Only remember this always: all ores take their origin from the universal corrosive acid, which becomes increasingly alkaline through fixation and drying. Arrange your understanding according to that acid and alkali and you will soon learn more than all the mercurialists, sulphurists, and vitriolists. Follow nature closely and consider its ways; name things inwardly according to those ways, leaving aside other names that cause confusion. If my opinion does not please you, however, I shall not draw you away from others. They say: “If metals did not consist of and grow from mercury, sulphur, and salt, why can they again be made from them and brought into those principles, as all ancient philosophers also acknowledge?” I readily grant that metals can be reduced into such principles. But I do not find that, according to nature’s rule and law, they consist immediately of them. In mines I find running mercury only in its own ore and those it penetrates and traverses with its star. I find salt and sulphur in most ores, but not common salt or common sulphur, as their characters attest: rather a vitriolic, aluminous salt and sulphur-pyrites mixed with arsenic or marcasite.

Very few practitioners understand the hidden signification of the principles mercury, sulphur, and salt. The ancient fathers understood them differently from what the foolish world afterward calculated. Do they not say that all things are made and composed from mercury, sulphur, and salt, and are resolved again into what they are composed from? If you argue that the character of mercury means running quicksilver, sulphur means burning sulphur, and salt means common salt, you miss the mark by more than heaven and earth. Who finds running mercury in the animal or vegetable kingdom, although their volatile part is designated by that same mercury sign? Who finds yellow burning sulphur or common table salt there, though the corresponding parts are designated by the same signs of sulphur and salt? Do you see how the world deceives itself, and how its understanding sometimes explains a thing contrariwise, with many thousands immediately following? The ancients did not understand it so. Although they designated running mercury with that character, it is no more the universal mercury than ordinary sulphur and salt are the universal sulphur and salt.

Even if running mercury can be made from metals, this happens accidentally, not through the natural manufacture of metals. If that inference were valid, I could make from mercury a water, precipitate, sublimate, vitriol, salt, oil, spirit, and so forth. Must I therefore judge water, precipitate, sublimate, vitriol, salt, oil, or spirit to be the principles of nature from which nature forges metals? No: that misses the mark widely. Such a person will not overturn nature’s order and manufacture with his accidental, chance practice, but will bring confusion into the whole of nature. Hence the world is full of errors: they always run around the circumference and never direct their eyes toward the centre. As they work and describe it, so they teach others; one blind person leads another into the pit. Each follows another, and not one in a thousand knows the ground. Thus so much is spent on potable metals and mineral medicines, not to mention alchemy. They have treated ores and metals with unsuitable solvents from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Even when using a correct homogeneous solvent, they have imagined that mineral or metal should immediately become a sweet, sugary oil. In this they have greatly deceived themselves, and then pronounce the art false.