The Fourth Part.

many it will not hold) are by the fire, when they are included in close Vessels, (for that Condition also is often requisite) dissolube into several Substances differing in some Qualities, but principally in Consistence. So that out of most of them may be obtain’d a fixt substance partly saline, and partly insipid, an unctuous Liquor, and another Liquor or more that without being unctuous have a manifest taste. Now if Chymists will agree to call the dry and sapid substance salt, the Unctous liquor Sulphur, and the other Mercury, I shall not much quarrel with them for so doing: But if they will tell me that Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury, are simple and primary bodies whereof each mixt body was actually compounded, and which was really in it antecedently to the operation of the fire, they must give me leave to doubt whether (whatever their other arguments may do) their Experiments prove all this. And if they will also tell me that the Substances their Anatomies are wont to afford them, are pure and similar, as Principles ought to be, they must give me leave to believe my own senses; and their own confessions, before their bare Assertions. And that you may not (Eleutherius) think I deal so rigidly with them, because I scruple to Take these Productions of the Fire for such as the Chymists would have them pass for, upon the account of their having some affinity with them; consider a little with me, that in regard an Element or Principle ought to be perfectly Similar and Homogeneous, there is no just cause why I should rather give the body propos’d the Name of this or that Element or Principle, because it has a resemblance to it in some obvious Quality, rather then deny it that name upon the account of divers other Qualities, wherein the propos’d Bodies are unlike; and if you do but consider what sleight and easily producible qualities they are that suffice, as I have already more then once observ’d, to Denominate a Chymical Principle or an Element, you’l not, I hope, think my wariness to be destitute either of Example, or else of Reason. For we see that the Chymists will not allow the Aristotelians that the Salt in Ashes ought to be called Earth, though the Saline and Terrestrial part symbolize in weight, in dryness, in fixness and fusibility, only because the one is