Inclytæ Societatis Regiæ Londinensis To the Renowned Royal Society of London

A decorative drop cap letter N begins the text.More than one illustrious man of our city has frequently urged me to undertake an examination of certain salts; however, it has not been possible for me to satisfy his desire and will until now; partly because the matter requires manifold labor, and partly because I discovered that the work I had previously expended on this matter did not succeed well. Furthermore, in such observations of salts as I had instituted, the heat and cold of the air can produce a varied mutation of shapes in the salts. Therefore, I devised another method of examining salts, different from the one I used before, which, however, did not itself succeed equally well for me in all types of salts.

Vinegar of wine, a whole barrel of which I purchase annually for my family and keep throughout the year, had contracted such acidity after I had kept it in the cellar for about three months that it far surpassed in its sharpness all the vinegars I had previously had. Whenever I had set aside some portion of this, after a few hours exposed to the air, very many corpuscles, which I am accustomed to call the salt