Page 42 - Treatise on Salt

grows in the mountains and in the valleys. In Aristotle; Our water is dry.
In Danthyn; our water is to be found in old stables, privies, and stinking
common sewers. In Alphidius; our stone is to be found in all the things
that are in the world, and everywhere; nay, it lies cast in the highway,
and God has not set it at a high price to the purchaser, to the end the poor
as well as the rich might have it. Now then, (thought he with himself) is
not this salt manifestly denoted in all these places? It is truly the stone,
and the dry water, which is to be found in all things, and even in the
Jakes; for as much as all bodies are composed of it, are nourished by it,
and are augmented by its means, and by their corruptions are resolved
into it, and also because a great quantity of this fat salt causes fertility.
This the most ignorant husbandmen know better than we do who are
learned, since to restore those lands which are barren by reason of
dryness, they make use of rotten dung, and of a fat and swelled salt,
considering very well that a lean and meagre land can not be fruitful.
Nature has also discovered to some, that the poverty of a land without
moisture might be likewise improved and meliorated by the salt of ashes:
it is for this reason, that in some places the husbandmen take leather,
which they cut into pieces, burn it, and cast the ashes on poor lands to
render them thereby fruitful, as is practised in Denbighshire, which is a
province of England: we have, moreover, an ancient testimony of this
practice in Virgil. This the philosophers have declared to us, when they
write that their subject was the strong strength of all strength, and that (to
speak the truth) is the salt of the earth, which shows itself such: for
where was there ever found a strength, or more terrible virtue than in the
salt of the earth, viz. nitre, which is a thunderbolt whose impetuousness
nothing is able to resist.

Our alchemist by this and other the like considerations believed he
had already attained to the main scope of the truth, and rejoiced mightily
within himself that among thousands and millions of others he alone had
obtained so elevated and sublime a knowledge; he already despised the
most learned, and even almost all the rest of mankind, for their
continuing to wallow in the mire of ignorance, and were not like him
arrived at the highest pinnacle of the most refined philosophy, and were
not there become rich of themselves, since there were infinite treasures
hidden in the virgin salt of the philosophers; then he resolved that to
acquire this virgin salt, he would rummage even under the very bottom
of the roots in a certain piece of fat land, in order to bring therefrom a
virgin earth which had not yet been impregnated; establishing

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