The Golden Chain of Homer

245. What is lost when an ore is considered only after smelting?

246. How does the author qualify the claim that metals consist of mercury, sulphur and salt?

247. Why does he distinguish running mercury from a universal mercurial principle?

248. What is the role of the stony matrix in the generation and fixation of a metal?

249. How can the same acid be described as making a substance more fixed in one setting and more volatile in another?

250. What limits does the author place on art’s ability to imitate nature exactly?

Book II Chapter 1 How Nature Reduces the Altered Chaotic Principles, Nitre and Salt, to Their First State: That Is, How She Makes Them Vapour Again

Read with: II.1.

251. How does Book II reverse the direction followed in Book I?

252. Why can dissolution be called a return without becoming the complete erasure of a thing?

253. What survives the loss of a specified bodily form in the author’s account?

254. How does the first chapter connect death with the nourishment of another creature?

255. What part does the circulation of the elements play in the return of bodies?

256. Why must a reader distinguish the destruction of a form from the annihilation of matter?

257. Which claims depend on the author’s cosmology rather than on a particular experiment?

258. How does the chapter prepare the distinction between natural and artificial dissolution?

259. What changes when a reader follows the chain upward rather than downward?

260. Which passage best links the two books’ accounts of generation and corruption?

Book II Chapter 2 How Nature Destroys Animals

Read with: II.2.

261. How does animal putrefaction illustrate the departure of the balsamic life-spirit?

262. What does the author believe happens when maggots and flies appear in decaying animal matter?

263. How should a reader distinguish that historical explanation from the observation that insects are present?

264. What role do volatile and fixed portions play in the account of the animal’s return?

265. Why does the destruction of one animal lead the author toward vegetable generation?

266. How are nourishment and excrement connected with this process?

267. What remains of the animal’s former specification after its bodily structure changes?

268. Which earlier passage about animal generation helps explain the author’s account of animal death?

269. How does this chapter make corruption part of a productive natural order?

270. What question would you ask the author to distinguish competing explanations of the insects he describes?

Book II Chapter 3 How Nature Destroys Plants

Read with: II.3.

271. How do moisture and heat begin the decay of a withered plant in this account?

272. What role does the plant’s innate acid play in its destruction?

273. How does the author explain insects found in decaying vegetable matter?

274. What evidence would distinguish that explanation from another account of their arrival?

275. Why does the decay of a tree require attention to both internal and external causes?

276. What does the chapter mean by natural calcination?

277. How is compost used to connect ordinary cultivation with the general theory of corruption?

278. Why does the author describe rainwater as a ferment?

279. What does the phrase translated as an unalterable predestination add to the account of natural order?

280. How do the volatile and acid portions cooperate in the return of vegetable matter?

Book II Chapter 4 How Nature Destroys, Corrupts, and Alters Minerals

Read with: II.4.

281. How do the two seeds explain the generation of all three kingdoms at the start of this chapter?

282. How are the sun and moon aligned with active and receptive principles?

283. What makes the destruction of a stone intelligible within the same theory as animal or plant decay?

284. How does art accelerate a process the author attributes to nature?

285. Why does the distinction between an ore in its matrix and a refined metal matter?

286. How does nourishment become an argument for the possibility of metallic transformation?

287. What objection does the Aristotelian interlocutor raise, and how is it answered?

288. What explanatory work is done by the analogy of bone marrow?

289. How is a metallic tincture connected with the idea of medicine?

290. Where does the chapter move from ordinary weathering to a more ambitious claim about transmutation?

Book II Chapter 5 the Anatomy or Separation Conjunction and Regeneration of Chaotic Water Into a Quintessence

Read with: II.5.

291. Why does the author choose regenerated chaotic water as the first subject of artificial anatomy?

292. What does the division into volatile, middle and fixed portions make visible?

293. How are the four elements connected with the twelve degrees of rectification?

294. Why must separation be followed by a carefully ordered reunion?

295. What does philosophical calcination mean within this long argument?

296. How does the circulation of a spirit through its own earth connect theory with practice?

297. Why does the author call the resulting harmony a quintessence or universal magistery?

298. How do the criticisms of failed work qualify the promises made for the operation?

299. What claims about charcoal, dregs or residue challenge a reader’s first idea of a purified product?