4 How Nature Destroys, Corrupts, and Alters Minerals

Chapter outline

The two seeds and their generation of the three kingdoms

Sun and moon, nitre and salt, as active and receptive principles

The gradual destruction of stones and the circulation of their matter

Art accelerates the natural process of solution

The distinction between ore in its matrix and refined metal

Transmutation through nourishment and the objection of an Aristotelian

Metallic tincture as medicine and the analogy of bone marrow

Everything in heaven and earth is made from water and spirit. This water contains the two kinds, nitre and salt. These two forge, without hammer or tongs, in the matter appropriate to each, everything throughout the whole world that is natural, visible, and invisible: all animals, plants, and minerals. For when these principles are spiritual in the air, the human breath draws them in; they are changed into the person's substance and seed and thus become animal. But when they fall to the earth's surface in the form of dew and rain, plants arise from them. When, through the waters, they penetrate into the depths by the earth's cracks, fissures, and pores, they bring forth minerals. The distinction, as has often been said, is this: the more volatile and fluid these two, saltpetre and salt, are, the more they produce animals; when midway between fixed and volatile, they produce plants; the more fixed they become, the more they produce minerals. Minerals are either of a stony kind, and these arise through the action of the two seeds, nitre and salt, by means of water and earth. How, then, can nature break a stone, grind it of itself into dust, ashes, and water, without hammer or iron?

In the following way. Nature has principal instruments through which she makes and destroys everything. One is fire and air; the other is water and earth. One is the sun, the other the moon. The first, the inner central fire, fiery and hot, is nitre: it is the pure, concentrated ray of the sun and its essence, its child and offspring, or coagulated seed. It is entirely fiery when brought into action, although it appears icy cold. Salt, by contrast, is cold and watery, the true mother of attraction, an offspring and child of the moon. In order to generate, it ardently desires the male, saltpetre, without whom it does not venture to bring forth a perfect body, owing to its earthy, fixed, cold, watery property. From these two, generation and destruction may therefore be expected and hoped for, spiritually and bodily, according to the differences among all things.

With these things established, let us see what stone-breakers nature possesses. As explained above, nature has a fire, whether the sun or the inner central heat. This fire warms and heats stones and earth throughout, so that they often glow. Let someone merely touch a stone or piece of iron exposed to the sun in the dog days: they will soon withdraw their hand. Water or cold then comes upon such heat and wets the heated stones. Heat and cold meet, producing opposition. For the heat has heated the stones throughout, and when cold water comes over them, the heat seeks to withdraw instantly. But it cannot escape through the stone so quickly, and is driven toward the cold, while the cold is driven against the heat. The cold resists and forces the heat inward into the stone, which bursts into pieces. In this way water and fire are united: the fiery stone falls into the water, and the hot stone warms the water, so that fire and water are lodged within one another. In the opening of the stone, two are opened, preparing and admitting a better and greater access for fire and water in future.

For example, in summer the sun shines on a rock and heats it strongly. Then rain comes and wets it, bursting the stone: it splits apart in the middle, flakes, and falls into pieces. This does not happen all at once, but gradually, as in the destruction of trees. Understand, therefore, that nature proceeds very slowly. These small pieces are heated again and wetted again by moisture and rain, so that the flakes burst into still smaller pieces. Finally, through this continuing process, they are shattered, split, ground, and reduced to sand or dust. This dust and powdered stony earth are heated again and wetted with rain. At last, through much absorbed rainwater, they begin to putrefy and become salty, or nitrous and saline, by means of their single innate principle. For rainwater and moisture awaken the stone's own coagulating saline spirit to act against its own subject. The stone proceeds toward its own destruction, just as plants and animals toward their death. Then the salt of the earth joins it, together with the doubled volatile seed from rainwater and dew. Once the stone has become dust and salty, it already stands in another nature, on the way to becoming vegetable;

for herbs and trees now grow from it. These herbs and trees decay again, producing worms and maggots, and from them flies, gnats, and caterpillars; or animals consume these plants as food. In this way the stone has been transmuted a second time: first into something vegetable and from there into something animal. This animal putrefies and resolves into a chaotic, universal, saline-nitrous nature, a material, vaporous water. Now the stone is once more chaotic first matter. You can see how nature herself goes backward—slowly indeed, yet very beautifully, by degrees. She likewise goes forward without great violence, gently and without great noise, without hammers and axes, blows and thrusts. She makes everything with and through water and fire. If nature could have salts as abundantly at hand as we do here above in our art, she would work as quickly as we do. One sees this on the highest mountains, where nature continually makes small stones from large masses and tears off sand and dust. A peasant notices this better than a doctor, and notices the furnace too, which in such an operation and generation must be attributed to nature and no one else. For no human being or heavy four-footed animal ever climbs so high; nor will feeble birds continually tear off stones weighing ten, twenty, or thirty pounds and grind them to flour with their feeble feet;

but if they poured abundant salt and saltpetre over such heated stones, they would soon make the greatest mountains into little hills. For when in our art we make a stone red-hot and quench it in saltwater, it falls into pieces—even if it were as large as a house, provided it were possible to heat and quench so large a stone. The more often we do this, the smaller it becomes, until at last it turns wholly into slime and water, as unfailing practice shows with certainty. If we distil these salts into spirits and dissolve stones with them, they become nothing but water at once. The reader thus sees that art can make a calcined stone into water in a few short hours, while nature takes a long time to bring the stone to that state. In this way the stone returns much sooner to first matter: namely, to a watery, saline-nitrous nature. By distillation this water can become vapour, and the vapour water again. Let the reader learn from this the difference between nature and art; from these degrees of nature and art, everyone can learn the destruction and also the generation of all things. When such salified stones are mixed with earth and entrusted to heaven or the air, herbs of their kind grow from them, as said above.

Nature deals in the same way with mineral subjects or metals. She heats them and bursts them with water, in which—as in all waters—a saline seed lies hidden, in greater or smaller quantity. This attacks the mineral or metal as its own offspring and makes it flaky and rusty. As it gradually becomes rust and crocus, nature resolves this, over a long time, into the nature of salt and finally into water. But someone will say: 'That may be plausible with stones. Yet nature will accomplish little with metals, which are compact, refined bodies. Gold and silver are difficult to destroy even by art, much less by nature.' I say, speak, and teach with a distinction. When speaking of natural things, I am not speaking of artificial ones. With minerals and metals confined in their natural place or mother, in mountains and rocks, never yet brought into fire or separated, where mountain, stone, and metal are still together, nature takes the same course as with stones. She merely works backward as she previously worked forward. She destroys such mineral bodies much sooner than gold, whenever she can reach them, because they have a manifest salt that she need only awaken through water and its salt to act in the contrary direction.