OF THE MINERAL WORK.

And here the work of extraction and washing is to be repeated so long and so often as there remains any of the spirit and flints. Meanwhile, it is also necessary that the extracted and washed flints be thrown away so that you may refill the cucurbits with fresh flints and continue the work begun. Even if you have no spirit remaining to continue the extraction, you must separate the extracted gold from the spirit, which is done in the following manner. And first, indeed, you must have a quantity of glass vessels, or retorts made from the best earth, which can retain the spirits. These you must fill to the extent that the impregnated spirit does not boil over during the abstraction of the spirit. Which done, it is to be abstracted from the gold by degrees in a dry B. water bath, which afterward may be used again in the aforementioned work. The residue, or the gold left at the bottom of the vessels, is to be separated from the vessels with a curved iron wire and preserved for its uses (similar to red earth) until you have acquired a sufficient quantity, which is enough for the separation and purification—concerning which below—to be instituted by antimony.

NB. But where you have extracted with spirit of salt red talc, red or black garnets, emery, calamine stone, and other fossils that contain, besides a little fixed gold, much immature and volatile gold, it is necessary that in the abstraction you add a little iron to the solution, which retains and fixes the gold, which would otherwise fly off in fusion. Therefore, such solutions and extractions of talc and others containing volatile gold are more rightly abstracted from iron cucurbits by