To understand charcoal without going astray, observe the following; it readily leads to understanding and distinguishing all things. Charcoal is pure sulphur or coagulated oil; conversely oil is charcoal dissolved into liquid. It can immediately be made charcoal by gently removing its moisture through a tall cucurbit in ashes: by degrees a coal-black matter remains at the bottom, formerly oil, while the moisture removed is sour vinegar. Acid too is therefore a resolved, subtilized, or thinned oil. What is volatile spirit but subtilized acid? The principles differ only in solution and coagulation, volatility and fixity, subtlety and thickness. Charcoal is coagulated oil; oil, coagulated acid; acid, coagulated or concentrated volatile spirit. Conversely, volatile spirit is rarefied and subtilized vinegar; vinegar, rarefied oil; oil, dissolved charcoal. Bringing charcoal into salt and ash gives the highest degree of fixity, yet distinct from charcoal. When ash and salt are melted into glass, the subject has the highest degree of enduring, incorruptible fixity.

To undertake charcoal’s anatomy, remember that each thing must be brought back to what it was before through the very thing from which it arose. Charcoal was previously oil, and oil vinegar; charcoal must therefore become oil again through oil, and that become vinegar through vinegar, because it was vinegar before. This can be demonstrated. Digestion increasingly coagulates and fixes thin parts; conversely, thickened things are thinned by conjunction with an exceeding quantity of their thinned portions. If subtle middle parts are combined with moderately coarse parts in equal weight, measure, and number, neither overcomes the other; they make a third thing, neither the one nor the other. To change one into the other, an exceeding quantity and quality must always be present and added. To volatilize fixed things I must add more volatile matter, or I cannot master the fixed dog; to fix volatile things I need more fixed matter to bind the volatile bird.

Whoever wishes to make charcoal oil again according to nature’s own ordered rule must take two, three, four, or even six parts of its own oil to one part charcoal. Take one part charcoal, powder it finely, grind in three or four parts of its own thick stinking oil, and pour on six parts of its own acid. Set it to boil in the water bath in a tall cucurbit with head and receiver. Oil opens the charcoal; acid dissolves and thins the oil, making them a volatile liquor that passes over together through the retort. To make it still more volatile, pour on its own volatile spirit, digest in the water bath, and return it to the retort. It rises more quickly, increasingly passing through the alembic according to how much volatile spirit was added. Thus one principle coagulates, dissolves, thickens, subtilizes, fixes, and volatilizes another, as shown before. True quintessences are made this way, rather than the weak tinctures extracted with spirit of wine. This proves charcoal is no dregs but the more fixed tincture of any thing. Once one portion is dissolved, it dissolves more and more until the whole charcoal body is liquid: the preceding volatile portions must dissolve and volatilize the more fixed portions left behind.

Another trial, visible to everyone, shows that charcoal is no dregs. Melt salt of tartar and add charcoal dust of any kind, as much as the salt receives. It becomes thoroughly black-blue and green, full of tincture. Pour it out, crush it quickly, and pour on most highly rectified spirit of wine. Within a few hours the spirit colours and draws in the tincture. Here one sees what chymists ordinarily discard. Take the blue-fused salt of tartar, boil it thoroughly with well water, filter, and precipitate its sulphur with one of the three acids indicated by unexpanded signs, or other acids. At the bottom you find a sulphur whose colour is no whit inferior to that of gold, iron, copper, antimony, and sulphur, and which shows itself in aqua regia as deep yellow as gold ever does. This reveals what lies in charcoal.

Here I must mark a principal point: almost all chymists superstitiously and obstinately believe, as firmly as the Last Judgment, that this tincture comes from salt of tartar itself. Its great error can be shown as follows. First note that they ascribe great effects to the tincture; from this they should recognize the penetrating power of charcoal and its sulphur once dissolved. When salt of tartar melts with and through a charcoal fire, every worker sees the coals play variously coloured flames—red, green, and so forth. These flames are charcoal’s sulphur, which as an acid willingly attaches to alkali, while alkali eagerly draws acid into itself. Each attracts the other like a magnet. Burning charcoal is acid and salt of tartar alkali. The dissolution occurs because alkaline salt seizes the acid of charcoal-sulphur, receiving a form or colour from it. Since such flames are dispersed into very subtle atoms, someone may have to melt for a long time before salt of tartar colours. But if coals crack and splinter, and a small particle falls into it through the worker’s inattention, it immediately becomes blue from only a little charcoal powder or dust. This also happened to the person who sought to catch air-gold or the sun’s sulphur from the air on a hot bright day. Here they see what they catch.

If salt of tartar remains molten too long, it loses the blue colour and becomes white again. Like makes its like: salt of tartar consumes the charcoal, turning it into salt with itself through most violent calcination. I shall show how to make not only tincture of salt of tartar more cheaply and in quantity, but such powerful, though supposed, tinctures from any fixed animal, vegetable, or mineral salt using their own materials, no foreign ones: namely the alkali extracted from any individual, for example wine. Take six pounds of tartar or vine cuttings. Put four pounds in an unglazed pot, unsealed and uncovered; put the remaining two pounds in another pot, seal and lute it, and send it to the potter. Let both be thoroughly calcined and heated together: the open pot’s contents will be white, the covered pot’s black. Boil the white mass into a lye, filter, coagulate, and melt it in a crucible. Powder the black matter and add it little by little to the salt of tartar until it flows thick and black-blue. Pour it quickly into a brass mortar, crush it swiftly to powder, put it in a flask, and pour on wine spirit that ignites powder. Leave it at gentle warmth day and night: it extracts the tincture. Gently pour that from the residue, and you have the true tincture of salt of tartar.

Likewise take as much alkali or vegetable material as you wish, divide it as before, and burn the portions together, one open and one covered. Leach one, melt it, and add the coal-black mass until the colour is saturated. Extract the tincture with wine spirit or its own volatile portion, obtaining the true tincture of any individual. For minerals, bring the mineral back to vitriol and calcine it as in a potter’s furnace, without letting it flow back into a metallic body: let it remain spongy like vitriol’s dead head. Extract the alkaline salt, melt it, and add as much mineral or metal as it receives, keeping the salt fluid. It colours; pour out, crush, and add wine spirit to obtain an extract like the foregoing. You have made from all things a tincture of sulphur in wine spirit, a thousand times more powerful, without disparagement, than apothecaries’ waters. To discover how much tincture the coloured spirit contains, draw it off in the water bath. A tiny quantity of powder remains: the sulphur and charcoal acting so powerfully. See, gentlemen chymists, what you throw away: a tincture producing such a great effect in so small an amount that a certain author sold it as potable gold and attributed incredible power to it, supposing he had caught the sun’s sulphur from the air on a hot day. It was only charcoal or charcoal dust that had fallen into molten salt.

If such sulphur does this in so small a quantity, without yet being brought volatily into a liquor, but only subtilized and extracted in its more fixed form by wine spirit, what will it do when brought with its own principles into a distillable liquor as I taught? That author called his extract potable gold. What title should I give this, when solvent and dissolved substance remain together and fixed and volatile are inseparably united? The great power of discarded charcoal has now been demonstrated. Yet when practitioners burn charcoal to ashes and leach salt from them, they think they have rightly separated the fixed. They know salt is fixed, but ash may trouble them. Go to the glassworks and see what ash is, what purpose it serves, and what it becomes: an imperishable, eternally lasting body, glass. If it becomes glass, it is surely fixed. Everyone sees a solid body supremely unconquerable by fire, a glorious regenerated body like a precious stone.

Everyone can infer, and the discerning judge, what has been thrown away: the most fixed part, the more fixed, fixing, most fixed subject. Chymists, you aim to give your tinctures a glassy, gemlike, or ruby character, valuing them otherwise at nothing. If you discard the glass-making being, how will you make so fixed a tincture, permanent in every fire? Salts melt in fire but also continually evaporate and diminish. Oil has no permanence, being volatile in itself. See what you continually forget and disregard. Many therefore say you take the shells and throw away the kernel. To fix, first seek the fixed body as fixity’s foundation, like a builder laying the most enduring stones first and then building everything upon that ground. Take the fixed and fix its own volatile upon it according to nature’s own order and law; then you obtain a proper medicine from all things. Yet all philosophers and chymists say animals and plants contain nothing fixed. None has considered ash as so fire-resistant a being. “Fixed” and “dregs,” or “condemned earth,” have confused their understanding so that they throw the best, purest, most transparent, and most fixed parts of all plants and animals onto the dungheap, often minerals too. They therefore could fix nothing unless borrowing from the mineral kingdom.