Let the pebble be strongly recommended to anyone wishing to make something lasting quickly. In it and its associated degree, as also in crystal, which is a completely translucent pebble, lies the principal point of all permanence. This is not to be understood of the crude material alone, but according to different preparations. It acts one way raw, another when made into water and oil, another as a salt, and another as a difficultly or readily fusible glass. Whoever understands nature’s degrees may go backward and forward. He makes the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed, as nature itself does, but much more quickly. Whoever rightly understands the origin can drive metals back into marcasite, marcasite into arsenic or sulphur, these into vitriol, and vitriol into a corrosive vapour or first matter. Conversely, he can bring such vapour again into vitriol, vitriol into sulphur, sulphur into arsenic, arsenic into marcasite, marcasite into metal, and from there into nature’s extreme and final state: glass and stone. I shall indicate this somewhat to encourage further reflection. To make a refined, smelted metal into marcasite, after repeated melting has separated it from its brittle parts, one must restore what it lost in the same order in which it grew. In the order in which it lost those parts, they must be added again; then the refined metal becomes again what and how it was in the mountain.

In smelting, metal has lost marcasite, arsenic, sulphur, vitriol, or spirit of vitriol. To make it marcasite, give it its own marcasite from its mountain or a like one. As marcasite outweighed the metal in weight and quantity, add more marcasite here too; observe the same in all cases. Take the metal, add a marcasitic regulus or marcasite, and melt them together. Once united, give it arsenic, then sulphur; once these unite, give it spirit or oil of vitriol or alum, according as the metal is white or red. By its excess quantity, spirit of vitriol or alum returns it to what it was at first: vitriol. Once brought that far, the vitriol can be made entirely into a pure vapour or corrosive water, as at the beginning. The last has become the first and the lowest the highest: “The lower has become the upper.” The process also goes forward. From vitriolic acid one can make vitriol; from that, arsenic; from arsenic, marcasite; from marcasite, metal; and from metal, glass. Briefly, mix the metal with its sulphur, arsenic, and marcasite, then give it its stony matrix in an exceeding or equal quantity and melt them together: glass results.

Mark this principal point. Just as making metal into vitriol and spirit always required a greater quantity of volatile portions because it was to become volatile, here one must take a greater quantity of fixed and a smaller quantity of volatile material; otherwise the work brings loss. To fix, one must not overload the kinds of material with a great quantity of volatile matter. Conversely, to volatilize, one must take much volatile matter rather than much fixed, or one fixes more than one volatilizes. Thus must volatilization and fixation be conducted, or little will be accomplished. Look at the extraordinary alchemical augmentations of those who wish to fix running mercury with perfect metals, taking without reason or consideration seven, eight, nine, or up to twelve parts volatile mercury to one part perfect metal. Do they not see that this is contrary to nature and all their rules? Someone wishing to fix should rather take the reverse: twelve parts fixed and one part volatile matter or mercury. Once fixed, this will increase with time so that he may add more volatile matter and derive benefit; but at first he must be patient. These augmenters still have a mist before their eyes. They do not see that although mercury adheres to the metal, it does not unite intimately and in its smallest parts. They should therefore recognize that a middle is missing.

They should seek that middle, for mercury is a volatile, conglomerated metal. No metal enters a true mixture with another without the middles taken from them at the smelting works. Go there and fetch it, or at least its like. The world is full of this error: they put the most volatile extreme together with the most fixed as the other extreme and want an immediate conjunction, while their work shows failure everywhere. Take volatile sulphur and put it with gold in the fire: sulphur flies away without harming the gold. But take the middles, arsenic and marcasite, melt the gold, and add them: they immediately make the gold into dust. There are middles enough available. For the red stars, is there not vitriol, yellow and red arsenic, antimony, and gold-marcasite? For the white stars, is there not alum, white arsenic, and bismuth? Everyone can grow wise from this. We have now explained the mineral kingdom somewhat and endeavoured to indicate principal points of its origin and end. Its chief point is this: whoever undertakes to fix something, make it lasting, coagulate, or thicken it has in this kingdom the finest path and a compendium—yet, as I have urged throughout, through middle degrees, not from extreme to extreme.

Yet this need not be observed with such exactness regarding the point of extreme fixation, because every kingdom has a sufficient fixing agent, as taught elsewhere. Whoever wishes to fix must not combine the most volatile and the most fixed, but the volatile, the fixed, the most fixed, and the middle degrees. Thus one reaches the desired end, and all this through homogeneous rather than heterogeneous things.