Coagulated Mercury is resuscitated or restored through distillations in retorts: living Mercury alone rises into cold water, leaving ash of Lead, Copper or sulphur. Sublimed Mercury is resuscitated and restored in boiling water, but must first be ground extremely fine. The boiling water dissolves from it the spirit of salt and vitriol which it carried up in sublimation, and Mercury gathers again, alive, at the bottom of the water. If this Mercury is again sublimed with fresh salt and vitriol and resuscitated in boiling water, repeated seven or nine times, it cannot be better purified and renewed. Keep this as a great secret in alchemy and medicine and rejoice in it greatly: by this means all impurity, blackness and poisonousness are taken from Mercury. Calcined Mercury cannot be resuscitated and restored without sublimation. Unless sublimed after calcination, it will never be brought to life again; therefore sublime it and afterward reduce it like any other sublimate.

The reduction and highest purification of sublimed Mercury.

Of calcined and precipitated Mercury.

Cinnabar, lazurium, mosaic gold and precipitate are resuscitated into living Mercury as follows. Take any one, grind it extremely fine on marble and make a paste with egg white and soap. Form pills the size of a hazelnut and place them in a strong earthen cucurbit. Over its mouth put an iron plate with many small holes, attached with lute, and distil downward with a strong fire so that it falls into cold water. You will again have living Mercury.

The restoration of burned wood.

The resuscitation and restoration of wood is difficult and arduous, yet naturally possible, though it cannot be accomplished without exceptional skill and diligence. To bring it to life again, the chief method is this. Take wood which has first become charcoal and then ash and place it in a cucurbit together with the resin, liquor and oiliness of that tree, all in equal weight. Mix and melt them in gentle heat into a mucilaginous material. You thus have together the three principles from which everything is born and generated: phlegm, fatness and ash. Phlegm is Mercury, fatness is Sulphur and ash is Salt. Everything which fumes and evaporates in fire is Mercury; what flames and burns is Sulphur; every ash is Salt. When these three principles are together, place them in the horse’s belly and putrefy them for their proper time. If that material is then buried or poured into rich soil, you will see it revive and a tree or small piece of wood arise from it, much more excellent in virtue than before. This is called resuscitated, renewed and restored wood: it was wood at the beginning, but was mortified, destroyed and reduced to charcoal, ashes and nothing; nevertheless, from that nothing something has been made and born again. This is truly a great mystery in the light of nature: a thing which entirely lost its form and was reduced to nothing recovers it, and something comes from nothing, afterward much more excellent in virtue and efficacy than at first.

Wood’s phlegm is its Mercury; fatness, Sulphur; ash, Salt.

The general method of resuscitation.

To speak generally of the resuscitation and restoration of natural things, its chief foundation is to restore to each thing and reunite with it what was taken away and separated from it in mortification. This is difficult to explain specifically here. We shall therefore close this little book and explain these matters more fully in the following book On the Transmutations of Natural Things.