We therefore divide what follows, for the red or white menstruum already given, vitriol and alum, into red and white metallic ores: lead, tin, iron, mercury, copper, and silver; then marcasitic ores, including antimony, bismuth, spelter, and all other marcasites, gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, tin, and mercury; then fixed embryonated sulphurs, such as haematite, emery, bole, precious stone, talc, lodestone, blendes, feather-white, calamine, tutty, and so forth; and lastly volatile embryonated sulphurs: antimony, bismuth, arsenic, vitriolic sulphur pyrites, and all volatile marcasites and pyritic ores. We shall teach how to dissolve these four classes in general and perfect their quintessence. But observe that the red stars are to be dissolved in the vitriol menstruum, the white in the aluminous menstruum. Take whichever ore you wish, make it incandescent, and while it glows sprinkle it with an equal amount of common sulphur. Stir thoroughly with an iron wire until the sulphur has burned away; the ore is then prepared for dissolution in the menstruum. Better still, take any ore directly from the mountain, pound it fine, and wash the gangue or stone from it on the washing board, as is customary in dressing ores into concentrate. Then, whether easily or difficultly fusible, detonate it, afterward make it incandescent and ignite it with sulphur: it too is prepared.

Take one part of this prepared ore and put it in a flask. Pour upon it three parts of the menstruum above: the vitriol preparation for red subjects, the alum preparation for white. Set it in sand to digest and dissolve. Gently pour off the clear dissolved portion. Add to the undissolved remainder three times its weight of menstruum and set it to dissolve again, until everything is dissolved into a clear liquor. Draw this down to a third part in a retort or flask, let it cool, and then set it in a cellar to crystallize. It is a vitriol and the remote first matter of that ore. If you dissolve this vitriol again in three parts of fresh menstruum, distil it through a retort, and cohobate until it has all passed over, you then have a primordial vaporous liquor that cannot go further without alteration. As soon as it is treated further backward, transmutation and specification into something else occur: into vegetable, animal, or universal. As long as it remains such a corrosive vapour, its root remains with and in the mineral kingdom, while its head reaches the vegetable. It can now readily be transmuted through the vegetable into the animal. You have here the whole mineral with all its principles: neither sulphur, arsenic, marcasite, nor metal has been removed. All its means of life, spirits, and generative parts have been brought together into one liquor. If, for example, you take refined malleable gold, silver, tin, iron, copper, and so forth, you have only one part. In smelting and refining it has lost its spirit of life and nourishment: vitriolic acid, sulphur, arsenic, and marcasite. The metal lost all these through violent fire; here all are brought to benefit, and none of its generative parts is missing. You now have a single method by which all ores can be treated, as experience will teach you.

If you wish to distil, coagulate, and fix this liquor or oil, nothing further is required than to digest it by cooking, by degrees, for thirty days and nights in a water bath, in a flask that is not too low, under an alembic with receiver, withdrawing the superfluous moisture. When nothing more will rise in the bath, set it in ashes and gently draw off all phlegm or weak spirit through the first, second, and third degrees. Remove the residue, put it in a phial, and set it in ashes to coagulate. It becomes a saline stone, liquid as oil in fire and setting like ice in the air. The phial need not be stopped, for it does not readily rise. You thus have the quintessence of ores too, but entirely corrosive and still harmful to human nature, because it remains mineral. To benefit human beings, it must be transmuted through plants and animals into vegetable and animal nature. Plants and animals are human food, not the mineral; this will be explained below. As for minerals that have passed through fire—common sulphur, antimony, refined gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, and tin—we must bring these backward again through homogeneous principles, adding what fire has taken away. Crude antimony has been deprived of its acid sulphurous and arsenical spirit, together with its stony mother. Through this acid, assisted by universal or mineral vitriolic acid, antimony could have been reduced more readily to its first being. Common sulphur made from sulphur pyrites has lost its sulphurous spirit and oil, and the coppery being from which vitriol is obtained. Gold, silver, and the other metals have likewise lost such parts.

So that the lover of the art may briefly understand what each metal and mineral has lost, and how its addition prepares and reduces the subject to first matter, let us set down a small table in words: sulphur, arsenic, antimony—such a calx is then readily dissolved by the menstruum above. Silver, copper, and iron, as well as tin ore, can readily be calcined with sulphur and afterward dissolved by that menstruum. Likewise, if antimony is stirred with sulphur in the fire until the sulphur burns away, it readily dissolves in the same menstruum. Mercury with sulphur and common salt, [underlined arch sign] or vitriol, also dissolves at once. Sulphur, however, is a dry oil, and no oil readily agrees with a salt or saline menstruum. Nature herself has therefore shown a suitable homogeneous menstruum: petroleum, a dissolved, flowing sulphur. Sulphur is coagulated petroleum and should be cooked with it into a fragrant liver. This does not make such a powerful stench as linseed and olive oil. The liver then dissolves in the menstruum above into a vitriolic liquor. Once the reader has made every metal and mineral into a vitriol, that into a liquor, and coagulated the liquor again into salt or a saline stone, each is prepared and fitted to receive the vegetable and animal transmutation, or nature, as follows.

I have said that corrosiveness is innate to the mineral kingdom, naturally heterogeneous and contrary to the vegetable, and still more to the animal. I have also said that no corrosive benefits any human being: it is a poison. The practitioner must know how to correct that poison into an antidote and alexipharmic. This can happen only through dulcification, and dulcification only through the vegetable and animal. Such dulcification is a transmutation or specification into another thing, so that a mineral becomes vegetable and animal, or a homogeneous medicine for those kingdoms. This explains why minerals are commonly corrected and dulcified with vegetable preparations such as spirit of wine and vinegar. All chymists cry 'sweet, sweet', yet very few understand what sweet contains. I shall therefore freely reveal, as a Christian, this most secret manual procedure, known to very few up to the present. The exceedingly volatile spirit of wine has been expected to accomplish everything. They learn daily what effect they have obtained: once the corrosive is no longer felt upon the tongue, they call it sweet. You chymists, do you understand Latin? Does the word dulce make everything sweet, even when it is not sweet? No. In chymistry the word must be changed in name, thing, and act so as to mean and remain sweet. Sweet is sweet and must be sweet, like honey and sugar, if it is to be called sweet at all. You must therefore make medicines that are truly sweet, not merely by comparison.

But am I to put a pointed knife into the hands of every meddler and theriac-peddler, as into children's hands? Shall I publish what fathers have reserved for their children? How the learned doctors of medicine, who have spent so much money and time, will complain of me, let alone the more secret sons of the art! I would gladly whisper it into each person's ear, confiding it secretly rather than publicly. Such people are commonly mere quacks and babblers, caring little to consult philosophical books and authors, so that they do not even understand the terms, much less the practice. Moreover, illumination must chiefly come from above. It is not in the power of everyone who wills, but of him alone who shows mercy, whose majesty fills heaven and earth. Unless he graciously favours a person's understanding, all their labour and diligence leave them sitting, like the Aristotelians, in empty chatter and darkness. Love of the poor neighbour is what prevails. The rich man finds his comfort in contemplating his ducats. To understand rightly what dulcifying minerals means: in their innate nature they are not sweet but mostly bitter, and thus heterogeneous to all vegetable and animal creatures. To make that heterogeneity homogeneous with the preceding kingdoms, chymists dulcify minerals through and with plants and animals. Once sweet, they are no longer mineral but transmuted into vegetable nature. If this vegetable is then made animal, or a growing vegetable, it is transferred in the stomach or digestive vessel, transplanted through its own archeus, and transmuted into vegetable and animal. Thus dulcified, they are homogeneous. For better understanding we shall therefore set down a tree of dulcification and harmony, through which the animal is joined to the vegetable, and this or both together to the mineral. Through this, dulcification is accomplished and the mineral can be consumed without harm.