Marengus — Chemical Pallas, ca. 1675 Multilingual MS

Likewise, all metals are ductile, and when struck, they dilate and extend. This is especially true for those that are well-compacted and soft, which results from a thin, watery breath that well-contains the earthy exhalation. For this reason, Aurum Gold is drawn out the furthest, into the thinnest foils, leaves, and threads.

All metals are heavy due to the thickness and compaction of their matter, but Gold is the heaviest of all. Metals have an acidic taste because of the sulfurous substance they contain mixed within them. Every metal, as we have said, is composed of Mercurius Mercury and Sulphur Sulfur. But one has a sharper taste than another, either because it abounds more in Sulfur than others, such as Mars Iron, or because it is congealed by sulfur, like plumbum lead, before the said components are well purified.

All metals except Gold are ignoble, incremable unburnable, and combustible, because they have not been well digested by Nature, nor were their components perfectly purified. On account of this, they abound in external and burnable sulfur.

1 Therefore, metals are composed of mercury and sulfur, and from Jupiter Tin is added earth, which is also commonly called salt, to which the Mercury and Sulfur adhere. They are mixed and cooked by nature and are fixed.

Metals have three qualities: namely fluidity, color, and sound and division. They have fluidity from mercury; hence lead and Stannum Tin, because they abound in mercury, melt very easily. Mars Iron, however, melts with great difficulty due to the scarcity of mercury. From Venus Copper, they have color and sound. Thus, Copper is very colorful and resonant because it has much mercury, but of an impure kind. Finally, Earth gives fixity or hardness; thus iron, because it has much salt or earth, is the hardest and melts with the greatest difficulty.

Now it remains for us to say something about the mines of metals and how the metals themselves are stripped from them. Metals are commonly generated in the bowels of the earth, and most often in mountainous places covered with the shade of forests. The grains of gold found in rivers are not generated by them. Instead, they flow out from the earth when they fall, being drawn along by the springs into the riverbeds. Sometimes, though rarely, gold is generated in the plains of the earth; but ordinarily, it is in the mountains. This is because the mountain earths do not exhaust their powers. Through vast fissures, excavations, and similar means used by human industry, through which the plains of the earth are forced to continually expire and exhale, and because the substance of mountains is more solid,