With and through all salts made spiritual, or spirits of nitre and salt, coagulated and dried minerals must go backward. Their own mineral, coagulated, dried-out acid moisture must be awakened to act and destroy its own body. Through this they become what they were at the beginning of their coagulation: a specified, spiritual mineral salt, or a saline mineral-metallic spirit, a vitriol; and this in turn, by going backward, becomes a spirit. By regeneration this spirit becomes a glorified, penetrating, medicinal-balsamic body, each according to its kind. Only when they have once been brought so far can they be brought and raised to further spirituality and pleasantness through volatile universal water or seed and chaos-water, or through plants and animals: volatile and fixed as desired, vegetable and animal, or universal. For every creature must be capable of transformation into every other, since they are born from one matter. Animals are expanded plants; plants are concentrated animals. Plants, in turn, are expanded minerals; and all these are one universal seed or chaos. The animal is volatile. The more the volatile is concentrated, the more it becomes vegetable acid; the more vegetable acid is concentrated, the more mineral it becomes. Conversely, the more the mineral is expanded, the more volatile it becomes, so that, ascending by degrees, it changes into the vegetable and animal. With this established beforehand, let us take up the destruction of the animal kingdom and seek its quintessence.