Page 38 - Treatise on Salt

same subject, of which the vulgar metallic bodies are produced, which
endure and extend themselves under the hammer. I give thee here a clear
description of the matter of the art, which if thou dost not yet
comprehend, thou must assiduously apply thyself to the lecture of the
authors, till such time as all things are become familiar to thee.

Having laid a firm and solid foundation on the doctrine of the true
and lawful possessors of the stone, you must proceed to the manual
operations, and a due preparation of the matter, which requires that all
the faeces, and superfluities be taken away by our sublimation, and that it
acquire a crystalline essence, saline, aqueous, spirituous, and oleaginous,
which without the addition of any heterogeneous thing, and of a different
nature, and without any diminution or any loss of its seminal, generative,
and multiplicative virtue, must be brought to an equal temperament of
moist and dry, that is to say, of the volatile, and of the fixed, and
pursuant to the process of nature, raise this same essence by the means of
our art, to a consummate perfection, that she may become a most fixed
medicine, which may be resolved in all liquors, as also in any gentle
heat, and may become potable; yet so nevertheless, that it do not
evaporate, as the vulgar remedies most commonly do, which always
want that chief virtue which they ought to have in order to cure, because
as being weak and imperfect, either they are exalted by heat, or they are
not: if they are exalted, they are perhaps only certain subtle waters
distilled, that is to say, spirits, so light and so easily exalted, that even by
the heat of the body, (which they augment so far as to cause tremblings;)
they are presently sublimed and carried upwards, ascending to the head
and there seeking an egress (as the spirits of wine are used to do in those
that are drunk,) and the evaporation thereof not being able to be made, by
reason of the closure of the brainpan, they strive to force their passage
impetuously, after the same manner as it usually happens in artificial
distillations, when sometimes the spirits being gathered together, and
become powerful, they break the vessel which contains them. Now, if the
ordinary medicines can not exalt themselves, they are perhaps composed
of salts which are deprived of all the moisture of life by too intense a fire,
and can therefore contribute very little to the cure of a lingering
distemper: for as a burning lamp is fed with oil and fat, which being
consumed it goes out: in like manner, the wick which preserves and
maintains life, is sustained by a balm of life which is succulent and oily,
and is snuffed by the means of most excellent medicines, as commonly a
candle is snuffed with snuffers: now, by reason our medicine is for

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