OF THE MINERAL WORK.

and perform this as long as you have flints and spirit remaining. However, you must not pour that spirit, not sufficiently tinged, poured on the first time, onto the spirit sufficiently colored and impregnated with gold, but preserve it separately and pour it onto fresh prepared flints, according to order, contained in the various funnels, until it too is indeed sufficiently colored; and once colored, separate it along with the rest from the extracted gold by the benefit of abstraction through glass retorts; and also apply the abstracted spirit again to a new work, namely, a similar one. And by this method, you can extract with 100 pounds of spirit of salt some thousands of pounds of prepared flints and separate the gold contained in them, which otherwise cannot be done by the benefit of fusion. The greatest art, however, consists in the extraction (the spirit of salt having been duly and rightly administered beforehand) so that the spirit is not lost, whereby many, indeed very many, pounds of stones may be extracted with a little spirit. But this caution must be observed in this extraction, which is done in the cold, that it requires a stronger spirit of salt than that which is done in the heat by the benefit of cucurbits; otherwise, the business succeeds more slowly. However, with a stronger spirit, they are extracted more easily and quickly by this (cold) path than by that which is done in the heat, as it is not so dangerous, nor laborious and expensive. This extraction of gold, therefore, requires a stronger spirit of salt (which is worthy of note), namely in the cold, than that in the heat.

And this is that method by which those golden flints and other golden fossils are prepared, and with the spirit of salt