The First Part.

that if we suppose them all true, I am so much the more a Friend to Knowledge than to Wealth, that I should think the Alkahest a nobler and more desireable Secret than the Philosophers Stone it self. Of this Universal Dissolvent he relates, That having digested with it for a competent time a piece of Oaken Charcoal, it was thereby reduc’d into a couple of new and distinct Liquors, discriminated from each other by their Colour and Situation, and that the whole body of the Coal was reduc’d into those Liquors, both of them separable from his Immortal Menstruum, which remain’d as fit for such Operations as before. And he moreover tells us in divers places of his Writings, that by this powerful, and unwearied Agent, he could dissolve Metals, Marchasites, Stones, Vegetable and Animal Bodies of what kinde soever, and even Glass it self (first reduc’d to powder,) and in a word, all kinds of mixt Bodies in the World into their several similar Substances, without any Residence or Caput mortuum. And lastly, we may gather this further from his Informations, That the homogeneous Substances obtainable from compound Bodies by his piercing Liquor, were oftentimes different enough both as to Number and as to Nature, from those into which the same Bodies are wont to be divided by common Fire. Of which I shall need in this place to mention no other proof, then that whereas we know that in our common Analysis of a mixt Body, there remains a terrestrial and very fixt Substance, oftentimes associated with a Salt as fixt; Our Author tells us, that by his way he could Distill over all Concretes without any Caput mortuum, and consequently could make those parts of the Concrete volatile, which in the Vulgar Analysis would have been fixt. So that if our Chymists will not reject the solemn and repeated Testimony of a Person, who cannot but be acknowledg’d for one of the greatest Spagyrists that they can boast of, they must not deny that there is to be found in Nature another Agent able to Analyze compound Bodies less violently, and both more genuinely and more universally than the Fire. And for my own part, though I cannot but say on this Occasion what (you know) our Friend Mr. Boyle is wont to say, when he is askt his Opinion