Metallerin İlk Maddesi Üzerine

The primary matter of all metals is therefore a viscous, incombustible, and subtle moisture, incorporated into a subtle earth, equally and strongly mixed through their smallest parts in the mineral caverns of the earth. Their proximate matter is quicksilver generated from that strong mixing. But since matter does not bring itself into being, wise and sagacious nature joined to it a proper agent, namely sulfur, so that by digesting and cooking it, she might convert it into the form of a metal. For sulfur is a certain fatness of the earth, generated in its own mines through moderate decoction and thickened and hardened. Sulfur relates to quicksilver as the male to the female, and as the active agent to its specific matter. Some sulfur is meltable by its nature, and some is not. Therefore, for whatever things nature wished to make meltable, she added meltable sulfur to them, so that it might draw out a similar liquefaction from the potential of the matter. And this was the cause of the melting of metals in fire and their solidification outside of fire, even though quicksilver by its own nature is always liquid.