EARTH.

Dryness belongs to earth accidentally and in a moderated degree, for it was created in the midst of waters. The order of things required it, submerged by its own weight, never to withdraw from moisture. But the creator, exercising his supreme right, removed the waters and exposed its free surface to provide room for the creation and dwelling of compounds. Earth was therefore freed from its natural yoke of servitude and the tyranny of moisture by grace rather than by nature's law, so that with a dry brow it might emerge into the air and receive the world's welcome light.

Everything cold and dry is without generative power unless helped from outside. Nature's most wise author therefore rightly willed the earth's cold womb to be warmed by celestial fire, and joined the moist nature of water to the dry terrestrial globe. By mixing the two generative causes, heat and moisture, he remedied earth's barrenness, and through the concurrence and mixture of all the elements made earth a natural vessel of most abundant generation. All qualities and all elements are therefore present in earth.

The world's founder wisely made earth's body spongy so that air, rains and celestial influences might enter. Moist vapours, driven by internal heat from the centre to the surface through the earth's passages, could then corrupt the seeds of things by a moderate putrefaction and prepare them for generation. Thus disposed, they receive life-giving celestial heat. For nature has placed magnetic love in the depths of things, by whose power they call forth and draw in the powers of higher things, which strengthen their formation and hasten the sweetness of the vital breath.

The heat rising from earth's bosom, moist and impure through the taint of mingled earth and water, corrupts. The purest celestial heat, however, generates by rousing, expanding and urging into life the implanted heat hidden in the seeds of things, concealed in their centre like nature's secret. Because those two heats are of like nature, they gently come together in the work of generation and unite inseparably until they issue in life and abundant growth.

Water is an intermediate nature between dense and fine, between earth and air: nature's menstruum, a volatile, fugitive body unable to endure fire, breathing out into vapour under even moderate heat, taking on many forms, and finally more unstable than Proteus.

WATER.

The moist element is Mercury. Taking on now the nature of body, now of spirit, it draws into itself through its revolutions the powers of higher and lower things. As though receiving their commissions, it negotiates and conducts commerce between the distant natures of the universe as their agent and guarantor. Nor will it cease its trading until all the elements of corruptible nature have been purified and fixed by fire and a universal sabbath comes to pass.

Water readily assumes the likeness of first matter because it is the nature closest to it. For chaos, the ancient parent of things, was a certain subtle, dark vapour, or a moist substance of darkness resembling thin smoke. From its subtlest portion the heavens were brought forth and spread out in order. Their threefold distinction also established its three provinces: the highest, which is noblest; the middle, which holds second place in excellence and dignity; and the last, inferior to the others in position and nobility. The denser substance of matter passed into a watery mass, which is a certain intermediate nature. The densest part settled at the bottom like the dregs of the entire mass and was made firm into the compact globe of earth. The extremes of the whole fabric, namely heaven and earth, departed further from their matter's first state and ancient shape: heaven because of its extreme rarity and lightness, earth because of its extreme density and heaviness. But water, allotted the middle place between them, remained a nature closer to the unformed abyss. Hence it readily converts itself through rarefaction into smoke or vapour, which is the image of ancient hyle.

Moistness is more proper to water than coldness, because water is rarer and more luminous than earth. Things that participate more fully in light depart further from cold, and rarer bodies are nearer to light. Water retained its mark of moistness from first matter and the abyss, just as earth retained coldness. For the world-building spirit divided the denser parts into those two related natures.

Coldness loves dryness and assumes it wherever it rules vigorously, by constricting and drying moist things, as snow, ice and hail teach us. For it is nature's work to constrict and dry water, than which nothing is moister, using cold as its own instrument. Indeed, moisture is the chief subject common to heat and cold, vigorously assaulted by both until it is conquered. Hence so many leaves fall dry at autumn's first cold, and, as winter presses on, the stems of weak plants are deprived of moisture and wither into utter dryness. Thus penetrating cold burns and invades things' vital moistures like an enemy. Hence comes slack and withering old age, and finally death, which with its sharpest cold, like a steel scythe, reaps all dried things and gathers them into its granaries. How, then, can anyone declare that cold favours the moist element and inheres in it as its most proper quality? Nature does not allow elements to act against themselves, lest they destroy or suppress their own powers. Yet intense coldness would undoubtedly conquer weak, defenceless moistness at once and, drying it forcefully through constriction, would exhaust it entirely or lay it low in its weakness. Thus, with one element brought to ruin and the work of the others left unfinished, the complete failure of the generation of things would necessarily follow. To attribute the greatest coldness to water therefore contradicts nature's law.

From those two denser natures, namely earth and water, nature draws her elements, from which she fashions her vessels and bodily organs. For their mixture produces mud, and mud is the immediate matter of generated things: it is like a chaos in which all the elements are present confusedly and potentially. The first parent of humankind was created from mud, and all generation thereafter proceeded from mud. In the generation of animals, mud is formed from seed and menstrual matter, and from it the animal. In the production of plants, seeds first pass through putrefaction into subtle mud and are then made firm into a plant's body. In the generation of metals, mud arises from sulphur and mercury perfectly mixed and dissolved into a fatty water; from it metallic bodies are hardened through long cooking. In the philosophical dissolution of metals and the creation of the philosophers' secret, mud is first brought forth when the seed of each parent has been purified and mixed.