The Prosperity of Germany, Part Two

metallurgy is to be hoped for and expected. For since all things whatsoever are brought to their highest purity by the benefit of distillation, which escapes no one, anyone will easily foresee by conjecture—if the purer parts are separated from the more impure in metals—what kind of good might be achieved from such a purification. But I cease to speak further of these things, since this distillation and purification of metals has been treated sufficiently clearly in the third part of my spagyric pharmacopoeia alchemical pharmacy, and it has been demonstrated there quite lucidly that every imperfect metal, when elevated through distillation, yields a fleeting and volatile gold, and that the same gold can be reduced into a body almost without any expense in a particular way (perhaps even universally, which I have not yet attempted). I refer the avid reader to the greatest of these Hermetic Mysteries and Philosophical Secrets. However, in order that the distinction between the methods of fixing and concentrating volatile minerals and imperfect metals may be properly understood and better perceived—and how much more swiftly and easily such an operation can be brought to the desired end with the help of niter than by the aid of common fire—it will be worth the effort to propose an example of such an operation, from which it may be sufficiently and more than sufficiently perceived how much labor is required through common fire, and with what easy business that fixation can be accomplished through the wet fire of niter.

It is, however, in no way possible that arsenic, orpiment, cobalt, and other minerals of that kind can be rendered fixed and constant without niter unless they are first introduced into other metallic bodies, roasted with them by the fire of coals, reduced to ashes, converted into scoriae dross/slag, thoroughly destroyed, and finally reduced into metallic species by the most vehement melting fire with the help of bellows. In order that all these things may be duly performed, one must insist upon the following way. First, cobalt, arsenic, or a similar realgar arsenic sulfide pregnant with gold must be introduced by cementation a process of heating metals in a sealed vessel with reagents into copper or iron, as we have taught above. Afterwards, that copper or iron cemented with realgar must be reduced to a powder, [mixed] with antimony,