Hardness and dryness

Meaning

Hard and dry are physical-sounding qualities used to explain the name ‘stone’. The main treatise first says the initial mineral is truly a stone, then adds that hardness and dryness allow it to be treated like one. These are parts of an argument about naming across the work’s changing conditions.

The same paragraph goes on to describe a reunited stone stable in fire yet flowing like wax. The earlier hard and dry condition must not be made a timeless definition excluding that later description. The English preserves the change from initial matter to completed state, rather than forcing every occurrence of ‘stone’ to denote the same outward texture.