The Hermetic Museum, Vol. I — trans. A. E. Waite (1893)

change into the elementary substance of metals. And, since such a transformation is beyond the power of chemistry, they can never become metals ; that is to say, they can never be the substance of the Stone. Second, since the lesser minerals cannot become the elementary substance of metals, which is mercury, they can never reach the middle and the end of the same development, namely, metals and the tincture. — But because the properties of the lesser minerals are foreign to those of the metals, although they may have some of the virtues of minerals, yet on the whole they are less excellent and are liable to be injured by fire. Therefore the nature of metals delights not in them, but repels them, while it receives that which is suited to it. For this reason they are foolish who bring in so many foreign speculations for the purpose of imposing upon their hearers ; for the things they put forward are altogether unlike metals and can never receive nor impart their nature."

The student must not suffer himself to be misled by the language occasionally employed with regard to salts by the philosophers whom we have quoted, as, for instance, when it is said, in the mystic language of our Sages, * He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies"; or, again, when he reads in the book of Soliloquies,* He who works without salt draws a bow without a string." ^ For you must know that these sayings refer to a very different kind of salt from the common mineral. This you may see from the following passage of the * Rosary of the Philosophers": * The salt of metals is the Philosopher's Stone; for our Stone is water congealed in gold and silver; it is hostile to fire and may be dissolved into the water of which it is composed after its kind." And that the *congealed water " of the Sages does not mean ordinary water may be gathered from the following words of Geber (lib. forn, cp. xix.): *Seek to resolve the sun and the moon into their dry water, which the vulgar call mercury." The Sages have also described their earth under the name of salt—e,g., in the * Sounding of the Trumpet, where it is said: * That which is left at the bottom of the distilling vessel is our salt—that is to say, our earth." — And in the * Allegories of the Wise " one bursts forth into these words : * Mark well that those bodies which flow forth from our bodies are salts and alums" At times they call the medicine itself

• * Salt," as in the following passage ofthe * Scale": ' The virtue of the second water is to exalt earth into its own mineral salt, as though assimilating it by its own strength." And Arnold, in his work concerning the * Preservation of Youth," (lib. iii) says:
• * "This prepared salt has great virtue in preserving youth. — The Sages have compared it to the natural heat of healthy youth. The Stone itself has sometimes been called by the wise the Animal Stone, sometimes the Mineral Secret, on account of this similitude ; sometimes the Everlasting Remedy, or the Water of Life. The whole preparation may be reduced to the purest drinking water, like other things that have the same properties.

From the aforesaid it clearly appears that we are forbidden both by the teaching of the Sages and by the nature of the thing to suppose that the Stone can be made out of the lesser minerals.