To make a stone, dry these crystals to powder, enclose the powder in a flask, set it in sand, and apply fire by degrees for three hours. They flow like butter and wax into a salty stone. To coagulate and fix oil D within that stone, powder it and take three parts stone and two parts oil. Grind thoroughly together in a glass dish, put in a flask, and set in gentle ashes by degrees for four days and nights: the oil also becomes fixed. Add another two parts oil, grind and fix again, continuing until all oil is fixed with it. Increase fire by degrees until everything fuses into a stone: the work is complete. We shall defend these three works somewhat. In the first I omitted dephlegmation and rectification because the more fixed earth, charcoal, retains none of the phlegm, only essential portions. Since all are homogeneous, I doubt the presence of anything contrary. Whether I pour little, much, or everything at once, earth receives only what it needs and freely releases the remainder. I do not burn charcoal to ashes because it contains the essential embryonic sulphur, which I desire to lose no more than any other portion.

The second work. Many will have doubts and ask where nature proceeds as this account intends. I answer: everywhere. Everyone readily admits that nature dissolves things through putrefaction. In plants we clearly see a withered plant, moistened by rain, finally become slime, mould, and dung. Farmers and gardeners continually experience this in great heaps of manure and material from firs and other trees, moistened by rain in forests until wholly black, rich dung and earth result. This is natural calcination. Such dung or earth contains an essential nitrous salt and a fatness or oil. Enclosed calcination burns that into charcoal; open fire makes the essential salt an alkali. This happens through our violent fire. Nature, especially at earth’s surface, never undertakes so violent a calcination, but gently reverberates with the sun’s rays. It does not burn oil and essential salt, merely reverberates them until eager to attract moisture—rain and dew—from which the plant receives growth and shoots into the air.

If such a universal salt is deprived of air but continually imbibed—as laboratory workers imbibe and draw off in glasses—vegetable growth is prevented and yields to a mineral nature. Continual imbibing, drawing off, and reverberating make it increasingly fixed, earthy, and stony, which is precisely what we desire. Yet this stoniness is unlike a stone from which saline radical moisture has been removed to the utmost. For medicine we seek a salty stoniness, a balsamic saltiness, which alone by its fixity and fieriness refreshes our bodies, protects against putrefaction, salts, embalms, and preserves them. Whoever desires this natural path should follow nature and will not fail; if he has better ways, let him take them. No lengthy discussion of the third way is needed. Those who separate dregs will themselves find it more agreeable than the preceding methods.