Take ripe grapes, press them to juice, and let them decay, ferment, or work: that is their putrefaction, from which wine arises. Or take wine already made, the older the better. Put as much as you wish into a still and draw burning spirit of wine over. Rectify it until it ignites gunpowder; you then have the volatile. Continue distilling until a honey-like thickness remains. Mix this with brick powder thoroughly washed free of light dust, so that when put in water it sinks immediately rather than floating; otherwise you cannot properly separate the dead head. The mixture must be dry enough to ball between the hands. Put it in a retort in sand, attach a receiver, and distil by degrees. First comes coarse phlegm, then a sour spirit like wine vinegar: acid or vinegar. A thick, stinking oil follows at an open degree of fire. A dead head burned to charcoal remains in the retort: this is the alkaline portion. Grind it to powder and throw it into a deep dish of water. Brick powder sinks; charcoal floats. Lift the charcoal off with a feather and preserve it.

Filter and coagulate the water and you find alkaline wine-salt. Dry both this salt and the charcoal powder thoroughly, grind the stinking oil into them, put them in a flask, and pour on the acid or vinegar. Fit head and receiver and set in the water bath day and night. Draw over as much moisture or recolaceum as will pass by degrees and set it aside. Open the head and pour on spirit of wine, the volatile. Refit head and receiver and distil slowly in the water bath. Pure phlegm, or recolaceous water, passes over, while the wine spirit’s sharpness stays with seed, or acid and alkali. Even if some sharpness passes with the water, the wine spirit is so weak compared with before that it can no longer ignite powder. The reason is that earth took as much wine spirit as it needed and released the rest. Through this operation the practitioner can better perceive how seed or salty spirit coagulates and becomes fixed, releasing the recolaceous portion.

Universal water or rain and its volatile principles are almost alike in smell, taste, and colour. They have no perceptibly specified quality or sharpness like the specified animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. Spirit of urine, spirit of wine, and spirit of salt have perceptible sharpness. When that coagulates upon its alkali through acid, the recolaceous portion is empty, mild, free of stench and smell, like ordinary well water. This shows that sharpness must be something distinct from tasteless water: it is seed and spirit, which putrefaction has given a salty, coagulating nature. Once the practitioner has coagulated acid and spirit of wine upon charcoal and salt and drawn off recolaceous water, let him consider how much recolaceous matter and how much sharpness or seed he obtained from the distilled wine. He will find the recolaceous portion far exceeds seed in quantity. First weigh the wine spirit rectified to ignite powder; after pouring it onto its fixed portions and drawing off the recolaceous water, weigh that water again and see how much sharpness or seed it contained.

The practitioner may think wine spirit is free of all phlegm because it ignites powder. Yet he will find it contains almost its own weight in phlegm, while its coagulable, fixable sharpness is a very small quantity. To send the recolaceous portion away with praise too, I say that it is excellently purified radical moisture, which consumptives and those with wasting disease should use as their drink. It restores moisture that has flown away—but only this recolaceous portion from which powder-igniting wine spirit has been coagulated and fixed. It is a very pure hylean vegetable mercury, or insipid, volatile, incoagulable mercury, and so forth. The reader now has the trial showing that only seed, spirit, sharpness, or the salty spermatic being and substance in all things can be coagulated, not the recolaceous portion. Separate the latter from seed and coagulation occurs in a moment, with fixation following close behind.

I said that if earth becomes saturated with wine spirit and still lets some sharpness pass with the recolaceous water, someone will worry how to coagulate and fix that and every sharp portion passing over. This is easy. As said before, gentle reverberation in ashes should make the coagulum or earth dry and thirsty: dry it very gently. Alkali, coagulum, or earth is then eager again to attract, coagulate, and fix the seed that passed over, allowing only insipid recolaceous water to pass. If some sharpness still passes, make earth dry and thirsty again by reverberation. Repeat until it has drawn all seed from the recolaceous portion and the water is as tasteless and odourless as clear well water. You then have the magistery or quintessence of wine and the vegetable arcanum. So too with all plants and animals, as will be taught below. Coagulation is followed by fixation: reverberate increasingly strongly in ashes until it endures the fourth degree; then set it in sand until that degree is endured, and continue as previously explained.

The lover of the art now sees that attempting to coagulate so much water is an understanding of the art contrary to nature’s own order, whose teaching goes before us everywhere. What agrees with each nature it receives swiftly, eagerly, and avidly, rather than moving so slowly toward perfection. In perfecting, it hastens swiftly and eagerly, as practice will show. Thus nature rejoices in its own nature, receives and embraces nature, and itself repels what is contrary or unnecessary. I have not continued in one furnace or one regimen of fire, but pass from water bath to ashes, sand, hammer-scale, and open fire, interrupting the heat. Here too I follow nature. It teaches that to harden or coagulate something I must not always boil it in water, which softens all things rather than hardening them. As I intend to make my medicine increasingly fixed, I apply increasingly strong degrees of fire, like nature itself, since a sharp heat does not make a permanently fixed body.

I see that ashes are stronger and hotter than the water bath, sand hotter than ashes and hammer-scale, and open fire stronger still. The stronger the heat, the more it fixes spirit and removes the recolaceous portion, allowing spirit and seed to reach the utmost coagulation of stone and glass. At the water degree nature makes watery, cold, easily decaying creatures called fish and toads. In half-dry, moist heat it makes more enduring animals; in air-dry heat, plants; in still drier heat, minerals. Thus nature uses the water-vessel for fish and their kind. For more perfect animals dwelling upon and above earth in air it already requires a gentle dry heat; for plants, a stronger and drier heat, because their bodies are harder and drier than animals’. We see the sun constantly shine strongly upon plants and the earth where they grow. Unable to move away, they are greatly heated and dried, whereas mobile animals can partly or wholly avoid such heat and seek refuge in coolness or shade.

Minerals require still greater heat: the strong inward central heat by which they are coagulated in various ways even into stone. The nearer ores are to the earth’s centre, the stronger the heat they must endure. As an animal’s greatest natural heat is concentrated in its stomach, especially in winter, so the greatest heat is concentrated in the great Demogorgon’s stomach, or the earth’s centre. Otherwise nature could not sublime or distil so abundant a quantity of vapours to the earth’s outermost surface. The nearer a subject lies to the centre, the more strongly it is fixed, unless the abundant continually rising moisture hinders it. The best and strongest metallic veins are found toward the centre, with branches extending very finely toward the circumference. As central heat rises, it cools and cannot fix everything perfectly. Thus in most places many minerals crop out at the surface, matured or nourished not fully into metal but into nitre, alum, sulphur-pyrites, marcasite, blendes, tin-bearing mixed ores, and so forth. Someone will object: “If nature works minerals dry and in such strong heat, why is there so much water within earth and still more at its centre?”

It is true. But water cannot rise so abundantly into earth’s channels and clefts where nature forges metals as it breaks out above ground for us. If abundant water entered and collected there, nature would dissolve the metallic, vitriolic-nitrous salts and wash them out into daylight, leaving empty vaults, cavities, and holes because water hindered all metallic growth. Water does not fill every place in quantity or enter strongly where nature works metals. Instead, nature fills those places with corrosive vapours that cling to rocks and stones, corroding by dissolution and bringing them into Gur. They make so much Gur that the cavities are filled completely; no moist vapour can penetrate farther. The Gur therefore increasingly coagulates, dries, and becomes fixed until it becomes a metal-rich stone defying and resisting all water and fire. If vapours enter places with abundant water, such as subterranean swamps, pools, and lakes, mineral seed enters and accumulates but is drowned. When it runs into daylight, cold air precipitates and coagulates it, producing a “wash-metal.”

What does not flow into daylight but remains in such waters nevertheless precipitates in its time, producing various ambers, gums, mineral juices, and mountain wax. What runs to the centre provides further occasion to be sublimed again toward the circumference and carried to a designated place to assume its species. If subterranean water so hindered nature, why does a miner dig out dry, stony, hard, rocky ores rather than soft slimy ones? Nor is water found among ores except from abundant subterranean vapours that resolve and collect in different masses, sometimes flowing out as a little spring between metallic veins. As for interrupting heat and letting the work cool, the practitioner should remember that I am not trying to generate animals, but stonily fixed things that do not spoil so easily. Nature shows the way: by day it cooks and warms creatures through the sun; at night it moistens and cools them through the moon, interrupting heat without harm. Above all, note that art does not seek to generate just as nature does. That would be useless, superfluous curiosity, since nature itself spares us that labour.