OF THE MINERAL WORK.

Where they are gathered and cause immense heat; and, not permitted to rest, they rebound and are dispersed throughout the entire globe, impregnating it with various and marvelous Growths, which the Philosophers call Minerals, fostering them and perfecting them in manifold forms. I shall here reveal the reason and manner of this in a few words.

Every spiritual thing, originating from whatever body it may be, is invisible and impalpable, nor can anything be made from it alone, but it is forced to remain a spirit until a subject occurs to it where it may cling, be united, and by whose benefit it may return into a corporeal nature, pure according to the purity of the subject and the spirit. The spirit occupies the place of seed, while the subject corresponds to the earth or matrix, in which it is cooked into a sensible body congruent to its own nature.

It must be known, however, that the reason for metallic conception and generation is far different from that of vegetables and animals. For in most vegetables that have attained their perfection, Nature elaborates a Seed for further propagation—the most excellent part of the herb—which, entrusted to suitable earth at the beginning of spring, produces a new plant similar in all things to the one from which it originated. By this action, the seeds of the same plant are always conserved. Although some plants are propagated not by seed but by their own root, these are very few, in which the root itself serves in place of the seed.