The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

subject under the sun, as Senior says, from which they could have extracted that spirit in its first universal state, and the salt of nature, which has not yet been specified anywhere, with easy effort. Therefore Arnoldus Arnaldus de Villa Nova, Avicenna, and all the rest conclude nothing else but that the first matter of the stone is a heavenly, powerful, fertilizing vapor that also allows itself to be coagulated, and is a gold in the making. For this reason, it is rightly called a seed of nature, which name truly belongs neither to regulo a purified metallic core nor to any other metals. Therefore it is also called our egg by some, because, just as the egg of birds is already a young bird in the making, so our egg is a gold in the making. Thus also, while the Sages report that the stone can be extracted from every matter, as Lullius and the Rose of the Goldsmiths original: "Ros aurificus" explain it again, both the simple-minded are deceived and the ignorant pretend that the philosophers contradict themselves everywhere. This is because, as Hilarius speaks in book 8: the human mind catchword: mind

is only clever in things that it understands. For this is to be understood as the preceding authors testify; namely, that our salt is called a stone for the sake of comparison, because it is extracted from our dew in the form of crude stones, in small stones, and truly appears like crude stones, and then also because the mineral salt extracted from the mountains is truly a stone. Likewise, the soda sodium carbonate from which glass is made is also a stone. Therefore Lullius and an ancient author of the Gold-making Dew original: "roris aurifici" speak: all salts are called minerals and stones, but not every stone is our stone, nor is every salt the salt of the metals and of the Sages. This is so even though, after burning, a salt or stone can be extracted from the ashes of every created thing, which is a tangible sign that a salt or salty stone is in every created thing. It is thus the first constituent original: "Constitutivum" of all things, since it appears last in the destruction of those things, and can consequently be extracted from catchword: every