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impregnated with these qualities, it purifies it to the highest degree through sublimation the process of refining a substance by heat and perpetual boiling in a sealed pebble original: "verschlossenen Kiesel"; likely referring to a sealed glass vessel or a natural stone cavity. It gradually turns the earthly part into an incombustible red sulfur the active, combustible principle in alchemy.
9. This sulfur afterwards boils away its moisture, fixing and hardening it perfectly, so that they can never again be separated from one another. Thus, the moisture is colored by the redness of the sulfur, fixed, and turned into permanent gold, which finds its greatest joy in the midst of the fire.
10. In this way, the stars, through their special power, dispose our general fountain into all kinds of metals and minerals.
11. For when they make our fountain more earthly and watery than fiery and airy, then our fountain is sufficiently specified for the generation of all kinds of minerals.
12. However, the minerals vary and alternate, as it were, when the earthly and moist parts are adorned with particular qualities, which happens through purification, boiling, and fixation the process of making a volatile substance stable in fire.
13. Finally, it is to be known that our fountain becomes mineral