Page 11 - Treatise on Salt

Chapter 2

Where our salt is to be sought for.

As our azoth is the seed of all metals, and that it has been established
and composed by nature in an equal temperature and proportion of the
elements, and in a concording agreement of the seven planets, so
likewise is it in what alone we ought to seek, and ought to hope to meet
with a powerful virtue of a wonderful force, which we can not find in
any other thing in the world; for in the whole university of nature, there
is but one thing, by which the truth of our art is discoverable, in which it
entirely consists, and without which it can not be. It is a stone, and no
stone. It is called a stone by resemblance; first, because its mine is truly
stone, at the beginning when it is first taken out of the caves of the earth.
It is a matter hard, and dry, which is reducible into small particles, and
which may be pounded after the manner of a stone. Secondly, because
that after the destruction of its form, (which is but a stinking sulphur
which must first be taken away,) and after the division of its parts which
had been compounded and united together by nature, it is necessary to
reduce it into one sole essence, and to digest it gently according to nature
into an incombustible stone, resisting the fire, and yet melting like wax.

If therefore you know what you seek for, you also know what our
stone is. It is requisite you should have the seed of a subject of the same
nature with that you would produce and beget. The testimony of all the
philosophers, and even of reason herself, demonstrate sensibly, that this
metallic tincture is nothing else than gold extremely digested, that is to
say, reduced and brought to its utmost perfection: For if this golden
tincture, was to be drawn from any other thing than from the substance of
gold, it would necessarily follow that it shall tinge all other things, as
well as it does metals; which it does not do. There is not anything besides
the metallic mercury alone, which by the virtue it has to tinge and
perfectionate; becomes actually gold, or silver in power, which done,
when one takes the sole and only mercury of metals, in the form of a
crude sperm, and not yet ripe; which is called hermaphrodite, because it
contains in its own belly its male and female, that is to say, its agent and
patient; and which being digested to a whiteness pure and fixed becomes

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