Subterranean Physics

INTRODUCTORY NOTES

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...to be employed original: "adhibendum"; I allowed myself to have good hope for the success and outcome of this proposal. However, some inconveniences occurred, which I felt necessary to indicate in a brief Preliminary Word placed before the Example itself. Here, however, after these more general warnings, I will proceed to carry out the goal of the Preface without further delay.

Lest anyone should perceive or conceive in their mind the true intention and the utility of this writing—I mean Becher’s Subterranean Physics—differently than the Author's intention suggests, it must be known that the Author in no way wished to provide a practical or experimental chemical system systema Chymicum Practicum; a "how-to" laboratory manual with this work. Instead, he intended to draw out, arrange, connect, confirm, and demonstrate a rational deduction and connection, or a solid Theory, from such experiments that he already assumes are well known and understood from those systems—indeed, from experience itself.

To this end, he did not use an excessive jumble of experiments, but rather select and principal ones that were familiar to him and other learned men of that age—things "in hand, on the lips, or in the ear" original: "in manu, ore, vel aure," a Latin idiom for things commonly practiced, discussed, or heard about in the scholarly community. Therefore, his chief intention was to establish Physical Science in this specific area, which must deal with the matter and motion, principles and instruments of subterranean mixing original: "mixtionis Subterraneorum," referring to how minerals and metals are composed within the earth.

He executed this goal with a most fitting method that corresponds exquisitely to the subject matter at hand. For just as a Theory concerning physical things has a physical Subject and an Object that is not abstract—nor to be absolutely separated from its physical nature—so he remained and persisted most appropriately in those terms of speaking and defining which express tangible and known things. He avoided gasping after things that can never be determined, which bring forth nothing worthy of such a great opening, but rather destroy science and leave experience empty.

Thus, it was not his heart's desire to speculate about the ether, about particles that are pointed, hooked, barbed, branched, elastic, etc.; about motion along a straight line, curved, transverse, folded back, increasing within itself, intensified by resistance, eternal striving, etc.; or about the sealing of the most subtle and mobile matter in pores and ringed openings, etc. Stahl is here critiquing the "Mechanical Philosophy" of his contemporaries, like Descartes, who explained chemistry using imaginary shapes of atoms rather than observable chemical properties.

Instead, he philosophized about Earths Terrae; in Becher's system, "Earths" were the fundamental principles of matter, including the "vitrifiable," "inflammable," and "mercurial" earths. Not how it burns, but what burns, where it burns, where it is, where it can be and be tolerated, what consistency it produces there, what sensible alterations it brings forth or even receives and undergoes within itself; from what kind of body it must be sought, into what other it must be transferred, where it is to be detected and recognized, and by what instruments and aids it is to be preserved or destroyed, and so on. These things, I say, and from...