Beat thin

Meaning

The gold in Part III: benefits and their rank · unit 11 is described as beaten as thin as possible. The passive geschlagen names mechanical working; dünnst specifies thinness, not a metaphysical kind of purity. The action is distinct from the preceding purification through antimony and from the subsequent transformation claimed for the compound. Keeping those functions separate prevents ‘refined’ from swallowing the entire description.

The English makes the implicit object explicit as gold ‘afterwards beaten’. The lexicon records the historical preparation vocabulary without converting its surrounding passage into practical instructions or supplying a modern target thickness. Its place is a later fermentation-related account, not the initial discovery of the one matter.