Two Dialogues on Alchemy

...wherever it abounds in plenty, metals are generated there, as Albert testifies in his work on Meteorology. original: "Alberto de Metheo." This refers to Albertus Magnus, a 13th-century bishop and philosopher who wrote extensively on natural sciences and alchemy.

DEMO: Is vitriol born among the rocks, then?

GEBER: Not at all, but in the earth.

DEMO: How then will it enter the rocks to find the mentioned washed sulfur there?

GEBER: Metal-bearing mountains are not rocky in their depths as they are on the surface. Therefore, when miners find earth and alum, specifically vitriol, while digging, they do not descend any deeper. They leave those mines or veins of metal. They know that metals are lacking there. Pliny asserts the same in his thirty-third book. Gaius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder, wrote the Natural History. Book 33 focuses specifically on metals and mining. However, it sometimes happens that not far from such failing veins or mines, others are found that do contain metal.

Since we can sufficiently prove from the operations of nature (as we clearly showed in Book 2, chapter 15) that only those things which have the nature of salt, alum, and similar substances are soluble: it will be manifest that even our vitriol can be dissolved by the power of subterranean heat. When dissolved, it exhales a double smoke (as I said in Book 1, chapter 12). Because heat is capable of mixing, it most strongly unites, binds, and joins together the subtle earthy part and the aqueous moisture after they have been digested together. Celestial heat, by its nature attracting the subtle aqueous moisture, also carries away some of the subtle earthy part. Aristotle affirmed this in the fifth book of his Meteorology with these words, when he says: the enclosing moist vapor and the enclosed dry vapor are raised upward together. Aristotle's Meteorology provided the theoretical framework for "exhalations" (moist and dry) that form minerals and weather events. This happens, as Galen and Avicenna affirm, through heat raising both vapors. Because heat is always capable of mixing, it causes the movement of one essence into the essence of another. These two smokes or vapors are called sulfur and quicksilver original: "argentum uiuum," meaning living silver or mercury. by the Philosophers. The earthy, subtle, oily, and somewhat digested vapor becomes the essential matter of sulfur, although we have called it by the name of arsenic. The viscous aqueous moisture, mixed with the subtle earthy part, becomes the immediate matter of quicksilver. Albert affirms this in the third book of On Minerals, chapter 4.