OF THE MINERAL WORK.

And if anywhere plants are born from the earth devoid of any seed or root, it is by the benefit of the Elements, which possess the power to impregnate the same barren earth and produce plants, by which they generated and brought them forth in the beginning of the world. Likewise, a twofold origin happens to animals: the first is the proper seed by which they are propagated; the second, for certain little animals, is even without sperm, emerging onto the worldly scene by putrefaction alone and the mutual action and passion of the Elements.

These two modes also have a place in Minerals: the one is the universal impregnation made by the Stars at the birth of the world; the other is daily. And just as the first generation of Vegetables and Animals is to be considered far more excellent than this accidental and daily one, so too for Minerals. Just as one vegetable attains perfection and death sooner than another, so too do metals and minerals; the faster they grow, the sooner they die, and conversely. And just as a rational and mobile animal surpasses a vegetable a thousand times in nobility and fixity, so a mineral, on account of its fixity, far excels an animal if it lacks an immortal soul. And when Vegetables, Animals, and Minerals are ended by a fatal period, they are corrupted and return to nothing; each element takes its own part, the stars keep the spirit, the earth keeps the body which it had given before, and the principles of the thing return to their own principles from which they originated in the beginning. By this compact, the perpetual death and regeneration of things exists, as experience testifies.