Metallic Embryos

Use in the book

Pages 75–78234 examine volatile materials associated with native washing-gold, red-gold and glass-ores, grey silver cobalts and related mountain kinds. The catalogue is part of an objection to promising candidates, not a list of acceptable starting substances. Khunrath gives two reasons for rejection. These materials are already specified towards silver or gold and strongly coagulated; they may also be mixed with foreign mineral or metallic spirits in the mountain.

Neither purification nor conversion to clear water removes the first difficulty. Page 78 insists that such liquids remain the solutions of metallic embryos. They require reduction through the first matter just as ripe metals do. Clear appearance and apparent immaturity therefore supply no escape from the doctrine that the regeneration field must be distinct from the specified fruit.

The term does not mean that the substances are useless. Khunrath grants them remarkable powers in preparing medicines and in other treatments of metals, and he recognizes silver-ness or gold-ness in embryonated as well as perfect metals. Their exclusion is purpose-specific: they cannot stand in for the catholic mother from which metallic generation begins.

Page 105 supplies a second necessary boundary. Fixing embryonic silver or gold is only ripening, whereas extracting already present precious metal is separation. Neither is transmutation in the sense at issue. An observer may see a more stable or more valuable product without having witnessed the allegedly radical change effected by a regenerated Stone. The embryo thus helps Khunrath distinguish three processes too easily confused by a gold-seeking laborant: natural development brought to completion, recovery of a hidden product, and the claimed transmutation of one kind into another.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 76The ore-associated materials are already called embryonated metals.
2. 1599 p. 77Specification and possible admixture are the two grounds of criticism.
3. 1599 p. 78Even clear solutions remain products of embryos and need further reduction.
4. 1599 p. 80The concession of useful powers begins here and continues on page 81.
5. 1599 p. 89Embryonated metals can nevertheless bear silver-ness or gold-ness.
6. 1599 p. 105Fixing embryonic precious metals is classified as ripening, not transmutation.

Translation in this edition

“Embryonated” retains the author’s developmental metaphor; replacing it by “primitive” would suggest the very pri-material status he denies. Historical ore-names are retained without equating each one to a modern mineral species, an identification the argument neither needs nor establishes.