The Fourth Part.

who am not asham’d to confess that I cannot understand what is not sence, must acknowledge to you that I know not what to make of them. Paracelsus himself, and therefore, as you will easily believe, many of his Followers, does somewhere call that Mercury which ascends upon the burning of Wood, as the Peripateticks are wont to take the same smoke for Air; and so seems to define Mercury by Volatility, or (if I may coyne such a Word) Effumability. But since, in this Example, both Volatile Salt and Sulphur make part of the smoke, which does indeed consist also both of Phlegmatick and Terrene Corpuscles, this Notion is not to be admitted; And I find that the more sober Chymists themselves disavow it. Yet to shew you how little of clearness we are to expect in the accounts even of latter Spagyrists , be pleas’d to take notice, that Beguinus , even in his Tyrocinium Chymicum , Chm. Tyrocin. lib. 1. Cap. 2. written for the Instruction of Novices, when he comes to tell us what are meant by the Tria Prima , which for their being Principles ought to be defin’d the more accurately