When you have cut, rasped, and filed hair, bones, horns, and hooves into small pieces, boil them with the urine of the animal from which the bones came, human urine, putrefied rainwater, or saltwater into a jelly. You may have to boil continuously for twenty-four hours or two days and nights before horns and bones reach this state; some do so quickly, according to the hardness or softness of their coagulation. Once made into jelly, they enter putrefaction within a few days and nights. Add further putrid, stinking rainwater or urine, enough to give the consistency of thin melted honey. Once it is putrid and stinking, separation and conjunction proceed in every respect as above. First drive the volatile parts through the alembic from the water bath, then the more fixed parts from sand or through a retort; after rectification, reunite, coagulate, and fix them. The other procedure is this. It yields less substance than putrefaction, but will nevertheless give satisfaction. Take horns, hooves, bones, hair, excrement, and skin. Reduce them to hazelnut-sized pieces, cutting the hair small, and put them in a retort with its receiver. Slowly distil by degrees everything that will come over. After preparation, reunite the parts in the order in which they separated. Here, however, the practitioner obtains no volatile, but only coarse phlegm, acid, oil, and coals. In such hard parts, the volatile has partly flown away through coagulation and drying, and partly changed into the acid or animal vinegar. This is the art's separation and conjunction, together with separation of the dregs, in which all parts except the recolaceum or phlegm have been concentrated and fixed.

I must here remind the reader and anticipate an objection. Because I bring up and repeat one thing often, he should not think it superfluous. It offers matter for further argument and gives him an opportunity, from each particular word, to see ever deeper into nature. Many will therefore say: 'He always wishes to follow nature, yet requires us to take many violent, mistaken paths contrary to nature, which never destroys anything so utterly or burns it to coal.' But a practitioner must consider the final aims of nature and art. Nature does not intend to destroy a vegetable or animal body so completely. It is enough for her to resolve such bodies into a mucilaginous, essential, seminal, saline, watery, or gur-like juice, as nourishment and seed to generate another of the same kind. She does not possess the power to quintessentify and make an eternally enduring, glorified body, as art can: a body no longer corruptible in itself. Vitrified bodies are the most enduring of all, beyond gold and silver. One never or rarely hears of glass and precious stones decaying, unless a practitioner deliberately destroys them into first matter; they do not readily do so naturally. In mines, by contrast, one sees gold and silver awakened and destroyed again by arsenical fumes, leaving an empty flux and an electral stone. In the first case, nature operates thus: she softens dead animals and soft herbs through dew, rain, other waters, and moisture, bringing them into putrefaction. Then the sun or central heat distils one subtle volatile part after another into the air. But this weak heat cannot raise the vinegar, oil, and so on. The residue left behind is what common workshops today call essential or vegetable salt. I call it animal and vegetable vitriol, because it is formed in the same way and bears a precipitated earth. On distillation, such salt or vitriol gives an acidulous spirit, whose sourness manifests a mineral taste, namely vitriolic acidity; thick oil follows, then coals. Nature does not separate these three in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. In the mineral kingdom she fixes and concentrates them still further, making them sharper and more corrosive, as seen in spirit and oil of vitriol.

Once animals and plants have thus been made into an essential salt or vitriol, nature continually imbibes it with volatile parts, such as rain and dew. The practitioner can undertake the same operation: make an essential-saline substance or jelly from animals, then imbibe it with a volatile spirit distilled from the same animal's parts, coagulating and repeatedly fixing it into a quintessence. If he has no volatile from such animals, let him take the volatile spirit of human urine and of rainwater or dew. When nature repeatedly imbibes, the essential salt grows upward into the air and becomes a herb or tree, because she does not quintessentify. The practitioner, instead, makes it into a quintessence, which nature does not yet intend. To make it clearer, I shall state the process plainly. Take an animal subject—the same applies to plants—and bring it to a jelly with its own urine, human urine, or putrefied rainwater. Let it putrefy and ferment; pour off the clear part and filter. Distil all the volatile over from this filtrate in a water bath, down to a third part or as far as oil; add the oil to the remaining liquor. Remove it and set it in a cellar to crystallize or set like a jelly. This is the animal essential salt or animal gum. Take the crystals or jelly and set them very gently in ashes to coagulate until dry, without burning into coals. Here nature ends and art begins. Let it cool and pour on enough volatile to stand two, three, or four fingerbreadths above it. Digest again in the water bath and let whatever will rise or distil, for it does not burn into coal or ash there. When nothing more rises in the water bath, set it in ashes again, coagulate to dryness, and reverberate somewhat more strongly. Remove it, grind it to powder, imbibe again with its volatile, set it in the water bath, draw it off again, and coagulate in ashes. Repeat imbibing, coagulating, reverberating, and fixing, and the quintessence emerges. In this way the volatile is fixed upon it, as it must be. Finally an insipid phlegm comes over, having left all essential parts concentrated behind it. This is nothing other than a fixed mineral nature, since it resists every fire. This is the best route, as nature herself works.

The other route that follows is wholly concerned with purity. It admits no dregs—as chymists scrupulously imagine them—but yields a most highly purified quintessence. Proceed thus. Once you have separated an animal's or plant's volatile, acidic, and oily parts, rectify the volatile and acid as thoroughly as possible from all phlegm, as described here and there in the books of almost all authors. Then take the oil, rub it into two parts of coal, and draw it over through a retort in ashes or sand. If you do not want the oiliness, rub the oil into its own coals, put it on a roasting dish, and set it in a baker's or pastry oven while the oven is being heated. The flame reverberating from above reduces the coals and oil to ash and salt. Place the dish where no wood or coal can fall into it and only the flame plays over it. Once it has become ash, leach it in its own phlegm, filter, and coagulate: you have the alkali. Put this again on a roasting dish and let it reverberate and become incandescent in the oven. Dissolve it again in its phlegm or distilled rainwater, filter, and coagulate. Repeat reverberating, heating to incandescence, dissolving, filtering, and coagulating until the salt becomes beautifully clear and white. The three parts, volatile, acid, and alkali, are then purified as well as possible.

Conjunction now takes place. First, however, I must recommend reverberation by flame. Laboratory workers commonly reverberate with coals under a muffle, which is nowhere near as fine and subtle in practice as the flame of wood. This penetrates much faster and more sharply than coals, because the flame is a pure, clear, very strong corrosive acid. Everyone is free to choose; I consider flame better, as experience has taught me. CONJUNCTION. Take two parts of the rectified alkali, put it in a flask, and pour on four parts of volatile. Then pour on three parts of its acid. They immediately unite and become fixed together, flowing into something resistant to fire, like an incombustible oil, while in the air they set like ice. Nothing further is needed except to set it in the water bath with a head and receiver and withdraw its phlegm as far as oil. Then put it in the cold to crystallize, and the quintessence shoots into crystals. Draw off the moisture again as far as oil, or evaporate to a crust, and let it crystallize again. Continue until all has crystallized, and you have the quintessence. Dry it gently, put it in a flask, set it in sand, and give fire through four degrees. It flows together into a stone. You can look down from above with a wax candle and see it standing like oil; when the fire goes out and it cools, it is a stone. Break the little flask, remove the quintessence, put it in a boxwood box, and carry it dry with you throughout the world. When you wish to use it, take a few grains and an appropriate apothecary's water or wine; throw it in, and it dissolves like sugar or ice. Then administer it and observe its powers.