Musaeum metallicum

...this union, metals would result successively. Indeed, just as no offspring emerges from a father alone or a mother alone, so no metals are generated from a fetid spirit alone or dry water alone. For chemists are accustomed to hide these principles of metals with unknown names, while by "fetid spirit" they understand sulphur, and by "dry water," quicksilver. Although, therefore, metals of different species can be begotten from sulphur and quicksilver coming together, nevertheless, according to the mind of Encellius, Nature always strives to produce the most perfect metal, namely gold; but, because of various accidents, it transforms them into various other metals. He adds that according to the purity and impurity of the sulphur and quicksilver, pure and impure metals flow forth. But so that this might be better known, he considers the substance of quicksilver and sulphur, mixed proportionately, and diligently thickened in the viscera of the earth by long-lasting and temperate decoction with a radical moisture that does not corrupt, reduced to something fusible and yielding to the hammer, to produce gold as the most perfect son of nature; but when the mixture of quicksilver is changed a little, silver arises as the daughter.

Gold and silver are brothers.

B, less noble than its brother gold (for according to the mind of chemists, gold and silver are brothers), conversely, when the impure substance of quicksilver and sulphur is mixed without proportion, and is less decocted in the viscera of the earth, and not thickened according to the mode assigned above, then tin, or lead, or copper, or iron results. These are the operations that can emerge from the aforementioned principles. But to confess the truth, it is an task of infinite difficulty to investigate the origin of metals; for which reason a certain poet sang with just causes:

No less wonderful is it if one can know the beginnings,
Of which every kind of pure metal consists.

We shall attempt, however, by meditating on the four kinds of causes, to investigate the true origin of metals, deliberately omitting the opinion of those who strive to defend the view of Encellius while they contemplate metals melted in furnaces, similar to quicksilver and scattering sulphurous vapors; since it must not be affirmed that metals are either sulphur or quicksilver. Hence the author of the book on the composition of the great stone, wishing to save the aforementioned opinion, wrote that metals consist not of sulphur nor of quicksilver, but of a certain substance which participates in the nature of both. Next, he notes that one must observe putrefied sulphur, which is easily turned into air when rubbed, which the philosopher later calls quicksilver; that according to its varying thickness and thinness, and also the diversity of the place, it is transmuted into various species of metals. We judge all these to be the triflings of chemists, first because their reasons are repugnant to experience, while we have it for certain that in some mines gold and silver are generated, in which no portion of sulphur or quicksilver is found at all; secondly, the same place cannot be very suitable for both, since the nature of sulphur differs greatly from the nature of quicksilver; besides, if sulphur (as they say) is the father of metals, it cannot enter into the mixture of metals, since it cannot fulfill two roles, namely, that of the efficient cause and the material cause. Nor is their opinion to be heard which is attributed to Democritus in Albertus Magnus, namely, that the matter of metals consists of lime and lye; nor that of Gilgil Maurus, who proclaims that their matter is ash soaked in water. Book 3. on Minerals, Tract 1. chap. 4. Book 4. chap. 5. on the origin of underground things.

D although, according to some, he himself, having set aside simple ash born from burned woods, understood pulverized earth. Some posit as metallic matter a very thin and very white water mixed with equally thin earth; and thus they do not seem to depart from the doctrine of Agricola; since metals, like water, flow melted by the force of fire and are thickened by cold, who perhaps wished the material cause to be, according to the mind of Albertus Magnus, a subtle, unctuous moisture, very well mixed with a thinned, dry, earthy element.

Braceschus in the dialogue inscribed "The Wood of Life" brought forward these things concerning the material cause of metals, namely, that from earth and water mixed together and burned, chalcanthum vitriol results, commonly called vitriol, from which later, as from the first matter, all metals come forth; and he confirms that this is true because dissolved metals acquire the nature of chalcanthum. Indeed, Theophrastus Paracelsus in the book "Aurora of the Philosophers," which he calls the Monarchy, wrote that Vitriol is, above others, a noble mineral... Chap. 12.