Page 41 - Treatise on Salt

ought before to have known from the same Geber, when he says, “That
all the imperfect bodies are no way perfectionable by a mixture with
those bodies which nature has rendered but simply perfect, because in the
first degree of their perfection, they only acquired a simple form for
themselves, by which they were rendered perfect by nature, and being
dead, they have no superfluous perfection which they can communicate
to the others; and this for two reasons: the first, because by that mixture
of imperfection, they are rendered themselves imperfect, since they have
no more perfection, than they stand in need of for themselves: and lastly,
because by that mean, their principles can not mix themselves intimately,
and into all the most minute particles, by reason that the bodies do not
interpenetrate each the other, etc.” Afterward this other sentence of
Hermes came into the mind of our artist, viz. “That the salt of the metals
is the stone of the philosophers.”

He concluded then with himself, that the vulgar salt could not be the
thing of which the philosophers pretended to speak, but that it was to be
extracted from the metals; he therefore fell a calcining the metals with a
fierce fire, to corrode them, destroy them, and prepare the salts: he
invented for his purpose divers ways to dissolve the metals, to make
them melt easily, and an infinity of other the like vain and superfluous
operations: but he never could by all these means compass the end of his
desire. This made him again doubtful concerning the salts, and the
matters of which we have spoken, so that he was incessantly poring in
the books of the several philosophers. He was continually turning over
the leaves, hoping to meet with some express passage relating to the
matter, and at last he light of this axiom. Our stone is salt, and our salt is
an earth, and this earth is a virgin. Here making a stop in order to weigh
seriously these words, he imagined that on the sudden his mind was
much enlightened, and he began to be sensib le that his former labours
had not succeeded according to his wish, because that he had hitherto
wanted that virgin salt, and that that virgin salt is not by any means to be
had on the universal superficies of the earth, because the whole surface
thereof is covered with herbs, flowers, and plants, the roots of which
would by their fibres attract and suck in that virgin salt, from whence
they would take their increase, and so all the salt would be deprived of its
virginity, and would be found as it were impregnated. He now began to
wonder from whence proceeded his first stupidity, that hindered him
from comprehending sooner these things in the book of the philosophers,
which speak thereof so clearly, as in Morienus, who says, our water

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