Manly P. Hall Collection, Box 3

veins appear in the cap distilling head, and when these veins vanish, remove the receiver and keep it sealed well with distilled water (which is its mercury) in a place as cold as you can. Then continue the distillation by increasing the fire, and its phlegm will be distilled, which requires a more vehement fire so that it can emerge from the alembic. Continue the distillation in this way until it appears like honey or melted pitch. Then let the vessel cool and keep the phlegm that distills. Afterward, take the first mercury or spirit that you distilled at the beginning, which you will rectify in this way: Place it in a large flask, whose height is one and a half arm-lengths. Afterward, put enough cotton lint into the neck of the flask to close the opening, which lint should have been previously soaked in oil, squeezed out, and tied with a hempen thread so that it cannot fall out of the neck of the flask, but so you can pull it out. Finally, attach an alembic to the flask with a receiver, sealed well with flour paste (that is, a paste of that flour) tied to the neck of the flask so that the vessels do not breathe. Once this bitumen is dry, place the flask over the fire of a gently boiling bath, and the matter will be sublimed into the most precious salt. Note this one thing: the beak of the alembic must be wide and open so that the salt emerging from the cucurbit and subliming does not block the beak of the alembic while it flows into the receiver. If that were to happen, the vessels would break, as once happened to us when we put this experiment into practice.

When you see that all the salt has been moved through this distillation, carefully empty it and keep it in a glass vessel, well sealed. This salt will be volatile for the dissolution of bodies. Without this volatile salt, it will be difficult to make a solvent, though it is possible with Saturn lead. There is also another way of rectifying or purifying the aforementioned spirit or animal mercury. Take, therefore, that animal spirit and distill it through a bath, and after half the liquid has passed...