A Defense of the Introduction to a True and Unheard-of Physics

...of the truth would never be. Through much practice,
it is known to me that all Metals and minerals,
in their ultimate resolution The process of breaking a substance down into its basic components or "resolving" it into its original state., again become a viscous matter.
There are likewise those who, by the inviolable argument
of reason and experience, do not blush to refer the
excrement of the stars fallen to earth (commonly called
star-snot original: Sternschnupfen. This refers to "star jelly" (Nostoc), a gelatinous substance found on the ground which historical observers believed was the physical remains of meteor showers.) to its first Element, on account of the
viscosity of the matter they display. And every natural
thing is either begotten and produced from its Element,
or separated from it, and is always reducible to its
primordial viscous matter. For the Element, from
which elemented things original: Elementata; in alchemy and Aristotelian physics, these are complex physical bodies composed of the elements, as opposed to the pure elements themselves. are made, resolves back into an
Element like itself: and so on to infinity. Therefore,
lest the elemented things be confused with the Elements,
the elemented must be distinguished from the Element.

§. 5. Nor does it stand in the way, the Anonymous author continues,
that the remaining two Likely referring to Air and Earth, which the author previously argued were separated from Water. were separated and produced from water,
for a Human is also born and generated from a Human,
and yet he does not become merely a part of a Human, but is
and is called equally a Human, just as the one by whom
he was born and gener-