Marengus — Chemical Pallas, ca. 1675 Multilingual MS

either before or at the start. Two pounds of the magnet or mercury are sufficient for the aforementioned powder to draw to itself all the gold which the said mineral powders contain. The one said procedure will be especially useful when the ores contain Venus copper, iron, and other imperfect metals together with the perfect metals.

Some, however, extract the metals from the ores as follows: they take the mineral stones and heat them many times among coals. Each time they are glowing hot, they plunge and quench them in common water. They repeat this until the impure and fetid heat symbol: △, likely referring to sulfurous fire leaves them. They will know this when they no longer emit a sulfurous stench. Afterwards, they place the said stones, crushed into coarse pieces, into a vessel, placing lead shavings or scrapings underneath. They melt them with a large fire as is the custom. That which falls through the lower hole during the melting is cooled, pounded, washed, dried, and melted again. Finally, they separate the perfect metal from the imperfect. That which comes out first in the aforementioned

melting will be more perfect. It should also be known that many artists proceed as follows in extracting the perfect metals:

They take the said mineral powders, washed and dried as we said above, or they take the metals or their dross original: "scorias" in which gold is contained, and pulverize them well. Then, with the said powders, and with fatty earth or clay, together with a proper portion of common salt and a fourth part of saltpeter relative to the weight of the common salt, they make a paste. From this they afterwards form balls, like the balls used for playing. They dry these in a hot oven or by a wood fire; this drying can be done within an hour. They pound the dried balls and dissolve them in a ceramic vessel with boiling water, making a lixivium lye or leachate. They decant this lye, which contains the gold that was extracted. They precipitate the gold from the lye by adding a sufficient quantity of common water to the lye to weaken it, which causes the gold to fall to the bottom of the vessel. Then, they wash and dry the precipitated gold and bring it into a solid body with melted lead. From the said lye, the most perfect saltpeter can be made by evaporation.