The Fourth Part.

observation, by a person of great veracity. The Phlegme of Wine, and indeed divers other Liquors that are indiscriminately condemnd to be cast away as phlegm, are endow’d with qualities that make them differ both from meer water, and from each other; and whereas the Chymists are pleas’d to call the caput mortuum of what they have distill’d (after they have by affusion of water drawn away its salt) terra damnata, or Earth, it may be doubted whether or no those earths are all of them perfectly alike: and it is scarce to be doubted, but that there are some of them which remain yet unreduc’d to an Elementary nature. The ashes of wood depriv’d of all the salt, and bone-Ashes, or calcin’d Harts-horn, which Refiners choose to make Tests of, as freest from Salt, seem unlike: and he that shall compare either of these insipid ashes to Lime, and much more to the calx of Talk (though by the affusion of water they be exquisitely dulcify’d) will perhaps see cause to think them things of a somewhat differing nature. And it is evident in Colcothar that the exactest calcination, follow’d by an exquisite dulcification, does not alwaies reduce the remaining body into elementary earth; for after the salt or Vitriol (if the Calcination have been too faint) is drawn out of the Colcothar, the residue is not earth, but a mixt body, rich in Medical vertues (as experience has inform’d me) and which Angelus Sala affirmes to be partly reducible into malleable Copper; which I judge very probable: for though when I was making Experiments upon Colcothar, I was destitute of a Furnace capable of giving a heat intense Enough to bring such a Calx to Fusion; yet having conjectur’d that if Colcothar abounded with that Metal, Aqua Fortis would find it out there, I put some dulcifi’d Colcothar into that Menstruum, and found the Liquor, according to my Expectation, presently Colour’d as Highly as if it had been an Ordinary Solution of Copper.