Page 40 - Treatise on Salt

A Dialogue

Which more amply discovers the preparation of the philosophical stone

You may have observed in the foregoing treatises, that the assembly
of alchemists and distillers who disputed eagerly about the stone of the
philosophers, was interrupted by a sudden and unexpected storm; how
they were separated and dispersed thereby to any certain determination,
and how each of them remained without conclusion. This gave occasion
to an infinite number of sophistication, and deceitful and erroneous
processes, because this unlucky tempest having hindered them from
coming to a final decision of all their differences, each of them remained
in the imaginary opinion he had formed to himself, which he afterwards
followed in his operations. One part of those spagyrical doctors who had
assisted at this assembly, had read the writings of the true philosophers,
who sometimes advance, that mercury, sometimes that sulphur, and
sometimes again that salt is the subject matter of their stone. But as these
sophisters had wrongly understood the thought of the ancients, and had
imagined that the common mercury, sulphur, and salt, were the things
which were to be made use of in the confection of the stone, after they
had been dispersed into may different places of the earth, they fell to
work, and made essays of all sorts. One among them had observed in
Geber this maxim worthy of consideration; “The ancients speaking of
salt have concluded, that it was the soap of the sages, the key which shuts
and opens, and which shuts again, and no body opens; without which key
they say, that no man in this world can attain to the perfection of this
world, that is to say, if he does not know how to calcine the salt, after
having prepared it, and then it is called fusible salt:”

As he had also read in another author, that “He who knows the salt,
and its dissolution, knows the hidden secret of the ancient sages.” This
alchemist was persuaded by these words, that it was necessary to work
with common salt, out of which he learned to prepare a subtle spirit, with
which he dissolved the vulgar gold, and drew there from its citrine
colour, and tincture, which he studied to conjoin and unite with the
imperfect metals, that by that mean they might be changed into gold: but
all his labours had no success, whatever pains he could take; which he

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