The Prosperity of Germany, Part Two

is carried out, is greatly to be preferred to that fixation which the flame of fire produces by the help of wood, not only because it is performed much more quickly and swiftly, but also because it renders all those bodies more constant and fixed. For if arsenic, cobalt, or any other similar volatile mineral were to be rendered constant and fixed by the benefit of common fire, how much time, I ask, would be required to perform it? Perhaps several months, if not a whole, or at least a half year. On the contrary, with the help of niter, it will be permitted to perform such an operation in the space of one or two days. If only some volatile mineral is mixed with niter, burned, and sweetened, and this operation is repeated twice or three times with new niter always added, it will afterwards sustain a sufficiently vehement fire. Or if some mineral is dissolved in strong aqua fortis and this is again extracted from the solution itself by distillation or evaporation, it will immediately remain fixed and constant in the fire.

So great are the hidden powers that lie in saltpeter, which did not escape the ancient philosophers at all, for which reason they said that for the fixation of volatile minerals, the most vehement and strong fire of all must be used, which saltpeter alone carries hidden in its own bowels, to be found nowhere else. Indeed, the central fire withdrew itself too quickly from volatile minerals and imperfect metals and deserted those that were immature and imperfect, which can be brought to maturity and perfected by fixing with our fire, both that of common wood and that of saltpeter. With these, I think I have demonstrated more than enough that niter is most suitable for fixing minerals and metals in the wet as well as the dry way, which no one will be able to refute unless he wishes to be insane with reason. Furthermore, I cannot leave in silence that the same niter also renders volatile not only immature minerals but also the fixed metals themselves, resistant to the violence of fire, so that like common sulfur or mercury, they are completely elevated by sublimation or distillation, except for the dross alone, which is left black at the bottom. However, it is easy for anyone gifted with understanding to conjecture what emolument