How sweet precipitate is made, and its use.

A great secret about precipitated Mercury must be noted here. After its colouring, sweeten it with water of salt of tartar, distilling that water from it, always fresh, until the water rising from the precipitate is no longer acrid but entirely sweet. You will then have a precipitate sweet as sugar or honey, a supreme arcanum in all wounds, ulcers and the French disease, so that a physician should wish for nothing better. It also cheers ruined alchemists: it is an augmentation of Gold, enters Gold and becomes stable, good gold with it. Though much labour and sweat are required for this precipitate, it amply compensates them and repays your expense. You also gain considerable profit, more than you could obtain through any excellent craft. You should rightly rejoice and thank God and me for it.

How Mercury is coagulated.

How Mercury is reduced to cinnabar.

As I have already said, Mercury must be coagulated in acrid aqua fortis, which is drawn off by distillation to bring about precipitation. To reduce Mercury to cinnabar, first mortify and liquefy it with salt and yellow sulphur and reduce it to white powder. Then place it in a cucurbit, put an aludel above it and sublime at the greatest flux, as customary. Cinnabar rises into the aludel and adheres hard like hematite.

The two kinds of ceruse and the preparation of each.

Lead has a twofold mortification into ceruse: one for medicine and one for alchemy. The medicinal preparation is this. Suspend lead plates above strong wine vinegar in a glass pot, closely stopped so the spirits cannot escape. Put the pot in warm ashes, or in winter behind the furnace. After ten or fourteen days you will find excellent ceruse adhering to the plates; scrape it off with a hare’s foot and replace the plate above the vinegar until you have enough. The alchemical preparation of ceruse resembles the first, except that much of the best and finest sal ammoniac must be dissolved in the vinegar. This produces very fine and subtle ceruse for purifying tin and lead and whitening copper. To make minium from lead, first calcine it with salt into ashes, then heat it from the side in a broad glass pot, continually stirring with an iron wire until it reddens. This minium is the best and most valuable and should be used in medicine as well as alchemy. The other kind, sold by merchants in shops, is worthless: it is made only from ashes remaining after the melting of ores, which potters also buy to glaze vessels. Such minium is useful only for painting, neither for medicine nor alchemy.

The preparation of minium from lead.

Crocus of Lead.

To reduce lead to a yellow substance, prepare it much as minium is prepared. Here too the lead must be calcined with salt and reduced to ashes, then continually stirred with iron in a broad assay pan over a moderate charcoal fire. Take care not to expose it to excessive heat or neglect the stirring, for otherwise it would melt and become yellow glass. You will thus have a fine yellow from Lead.

How an azure colour is made from silver.

To mortify silver into lazurium or something like it, proceed thus. Beat Silver into plates and mix it with Mercury; suspend it in a glass pot above excellent vinegar in which auratae have first been boiled, and in which sal ammoniac and calcined tartar have afterward been dissolved. In every other respect proceed as described for ceruse. After fourteen days you will always have very excellent and beautiful lazurium adhering to the silver plates; wipe it away with a hare’s foot.