how an exhalation may by its lightness make so great a heap of Earth and of huge weight to stumble sooner then to consult of coagulating And upon every event there should not be room but for one elevation of the Earth and one onely settling of the same after some gaping chap is found but not of stirring up a quaking trembling But let these Dreams be in watery places Meadows Clayie places pooles the Sea Rivers c. Therefore the absurdities which I granted before in jest I will now oppose in earnest First of all I demand what is that so unwonted heat which from the year 1580 even unto the year 1640 was not seen at Mecheline as neither an Earth-quake wherefore not every year wherefore in the 2d moneth called April under a most cold night when as the day before it had snowed much under the continuall North Winde and not under the Dog-Star Is it because the more inward parts of the Earth are then hot Why therefore not every year in the eleventh moneth called January But this Argument of the Antients ceaseth after that the Instrument meating out the Degrees of the encompassing Air is found For Wells and Caves are found all the year of an equall heat and cold Again why doth so great heat the stirrer up of exhalations cease so suddenly especially where it may stir up an exhalation the moover of so great an heap by what fewell it is kindled under the water by what Fodder doth it live and subsist by what Law is it not in the same place stifâ—ed by what priviledge doth it despise the respects of bodies places and weights at length by what Prerogative doth it stir up an exhalation of so great a vastness out of moyst Bodies without moyst vapours or if it doth also allure or draw out vapours after the ordinary manner why do not these mitigate a heat of so great moment do they extinguish do they choak together with their Sisters and forthwith following exhalations or what is that exhalation which shaketh the vast Tower of Mecheline with no greater respect than a low Cottage nor that respecteth any resistance of a huge weight or which doth in a like manner operate near at hand as at a distance or which doth at once every where and alike finde throughout its whole Superficies the collected power of its own Center that at once every where alike it may operate in one moment equally and alike strongly Why through the necessity of naturall causes is not the thred broken in the weaker part but all things do at once undergoe yea and sustain the same law of violence Surely if these things be rightly considered there is found in the Earth-quake a certain operative force of an infinite power which lifts up Mountains and Towers without respect of lightness or weight as if nothing were able to resist this moving virtue But I have proved that an exhalation if in any there be an efficient moving cause of an Earth-quake is neither of the race of Salts nor of Sulphurs as neither of Mercuries because that this is not an exhalation but the vapour of the watery parts Therefore it remains that it is not an exhalation but Gas it self not an eflux of Bodies stirred up by heat but rather an effect remaining after the fire To wit the Gas of the flame of the fire alone or of the smoak sprung from this But neither of these exhalations also can be the effective cause of an Earth-quake Therefore if none of these exhalations be the mover of the Earth there shall be none at all since another is not found and by consequence it is a vain fiction of the Schooles which they will have themselves to be believed in in the Earth-quake But if indeed they thinking of an escape do say that they do not understand an exhalation raised up by heat not brought forth by dryness but an unnamed vapour constituted by its causes To wit like as Aristotle writeth that all Rockie Stones small stones Mineralls and likewise the Salt of the Sea Comets although a hundred fold bigger than the Globe of the Earth and all Windes do proceed from some irregular and un-explained exhalations distinguishing the Windes therein against the Air This I say is to be willing to doat with Aristotle and to remain ignorant of naturall Philosophy with the same Aristotle Lastly it is an impertinent thing for them to have cited Aristotle and by his authority to be willing to defend their errours Notwithstanding I will treat against the Schooles by reason that seeing they do publish themselves to be so rationall they may deliver up their weapons to reason I say therefore that no exhalation can be more light simple or subtile than the Air because this is the simple body of an Element but that is a composed body and so however it be it hath in it a weighty body which the Air wanteth Yet the Air is not lighter than a Body that is without weight that is the Air is not lighter than it self nor can it lift up any thing besides it self unless by the motion of a Flatus or blast or of flowing that is by a Blas Which ceasing the body which it lifted up setleth From whence I conclude that the Air or Winde whether it be shut up or free cannot lift up the Earth by reason of its lightness alone unless it be by chance stricken by an externall and violent Mover but in this case the force of the exhalation ceaseth seeing it is a constraining force which moveth but not the exhalation it self Because it is that which in such a case is onely the mean or Instrument of motion but not the chief motive force And much lesse is that agreeable to an exhalation because it is that which is thicker and weightier than the Air as it containeth water I prove it by Handicraft-operation A Bladder stretched out with Air springs up out of the water not primarily because the Air is lighter than water but because the water is a heavy and fluide body and therefore it suffers not it self to be driven out of its place by a lighter body For indeed it is the first endeavour of the water to joyn it self to the water from whence it was seperated its secondary endeavour or that as it were by accident is to presse out by its falling together whatsoever is lighter than it self Therefore weightiness not lightness doth operate in this thing for the reason straightway to be shewed Let a Bladder able to contain three pounds or pints of water be put in a small trench or ditch and let it be covered with Earth Truly it shall not shake off from it half an ounce of the dust poured upon it Yea neither shall the Bladder desire to appear out of the dry more weighty Sand. Let it therefore be ridiculous that a Bladder weighing half an ounce doth ever from any lightness of Air of its own accord fly up into the Air. If therefore
unprofitable in other kind of madnesses Therefore it happened at Antwerp that a Carpenter perswading himself that in the night-timehe had seen horrid appearances or ghosts became wholly mad with the terrour thereof And he was sent unto the Tomb of St. Dympna the Virgin where those who are possessed by an evil spirit are wont to be freed the matter being thereby wrested into an abuse that all mad men should indifferently be sent thither As if the condition of those that are possessed and mad were the same The Carpenter therefore is nourished a whole year and mad however the wonted remedies were implored and when as moneys were not sent from Antwerp for the last half year they sent back the mad man bound in a waggon who when he had loosed his bonds he leapt out of the Wain into a deep and neighbouring pool He being at length drawn out was laid up into the Waggon for a dead Carcasse but he lived for eighteen years after free from madnesse By which example I being raised unto an hope knew that not only the madnesse from a mad dog but also that an inveterate or ancient Mania or madness might be cured And that thing I afterwards often tried neither hath the event deceived me but as oft as through fear I drew these mad persons over-hastily out of the water I likewise learned by the example of the Carpenter that it would be all one whether the aforesaid plunging or choaking of the mad Idea should happen to be in fresh water or salt A certain woman to me known commendable for her much honesty in the moneth November in a dark evening rushed head-long from a bridg into a small River or Brook with a Carr of two wheels And when they were intent about the horse they neglected the poor â—id woman but she remained under the water until they had unloaded the Carr of some wares At length being mindful of that poor old woman they brought her to a neighbouring Village as it were a drowned dead carcasse wherein the wife of the Inn laid that woman on a table with her face placed downwards and her head hanging downwards And it came to pass that she thus dismissed the water drawn into the lungs It seemed to me like a fable until mat in the mountains of Hannonia or Hungarie a young man drowned in swimming is brought unto a noble Matron a companion of my journey who bad the mother bewailing the death of her son to be of good cheer Therefore she stretched the young man with his face placed downward upon his knees and when the feeble young man thus hung being altogether naked he at length the water being cast back began to breath again and revived in our sight Again I remember that in the year 1606. I returning in the evening from the Castle of Perla two leagues distant from Antwerp found a company on the bank of the Rotomagian Channel because they complained that a young man the only son of a rich widdow was drowned who was sent for and found his dead carcass laying on the ground in the stubble or straw she took him up into her lap and kissed him weeping bitterly I bad that she should turn his body with his head and shoulders hanging downwards and his back upwards and the young man began after a quarter of an hour to breath again I have learned therefore that drowned persons do not easily die seeing both the aforesaid young men lurked perhaps for the space of half an hour under the water Neither must there be a cessation from prayer as soon as he which is believed to be dead doth cease to take breath Galen for madnesse of the biting of a mad dog before the fear of waters hath arose gives Cray-fishes or Crabs calcined to drink for fourty dayes Yet if that Calx be not given presently after the beginning it profiteth nothing and so also thus the use thereof hath remained unaccustomed In the mean time it is ridiculous that in burning of Crabs they add myrrhe c. or when they melt silver for to make a cup or flagon for a Perfuming-shop that they add Triacle The antidote whereof the devouring flame consumes before the living creature be roasted But Paracelsus affirms that the Hydrophobia is cured by sharp loosening medicines but surely the event hath not answered his promises Therefore Catholiques despairing nor trusting to these remedies of the Universities our Country-men flee to St. Hubbert where by some Rites performed they are cured Yet this is remarkable therein That if the Rites be not precisely observed the madness which otherwise did hitherto long lay hid doth forthwith arise and the Hydrophobians are left without hope There is a robe or gown of S. Hubbert locked up in a chest with six divers keys and also kept by six divers Key-keepers but they do every year cut off part of that garment the garment the while remaining always whole for eight hundred years now and more Neither is it a place of jugling deceit because it is not known at this day whether the Robe be of fine flax wool hemp or cotton and so neither could a new one be yearly substituted in its room But they cut off part of the garment that they may incarnate a thread or rag thereof within the skin of the forehead of every one that is bitten by a mad dog For from hence there is another miracle That he who hath once recovered by his rites through the thread or rag taken out of the robe may delay the time for another that is bitten and stupifie the prevailing madnesse for fourty dayes and that for some years until they to their own profit can at length come to Saint Hubbert yet with that condition that if any one do tarry never so little above fourty dayes and hath not as was said before obtained by request a prolonging of the limited time he presently falls into a desperate madness For the Lombards do thus run to the Saints Belline and Donine and so do request preservation And they require the healing to be from a madnesse arising from a deed done But for foolish madness or being out of ones mind they do not hitherto as I know of invoke any heavenly Patron CHAP. XXXVII The Seat of the Soul 1. The matter is as yet before the Judge 2. A third opinion 3. The head being dead a certain Bride hath over-lived for eight hours at least 4. The mouth of the Stomach being smitten hath brought a sudden and total death 5. A Paradox of the Authour concerning the Seat of the Soul 6. The Creation teacheth this seat 7. Physitians do occultly consent to those very things unwittingly 8. The Lord confirmeth the Paradox of the Authour 9. Some reasons 10. Against the existence of the Vegetative Soul 11. The Heart is a servant to the Stomach 12. The seat remains fixt 13. That the first powers of conceptions are felt in the mouth of the Stomach 14. They unwillingly place
unto Colours therefore we leave the Speculation of those unto others being content with the attainment of the Cherionial or occult quality Last of all notwithstanding we must answer to an objection To wit wherefore is the Fountain Tonneletius with the Plenty of its hungry and hot Salt said rather to Cool and to be troublesome to the Stomack I will give Satisfaction The hungry Salt although it be hot in its first qualities no otherwise than as Oyl of Vitriol Sulphur Aqua Fortis c. are yet it Cooleth by a third and proper Cherionial quality to wit as either being hurtful through its super-abounding it weakens our heat but especially because through its sharpness it dissolves the Secondary humour or immediate nourishment of the Stomack and makes it unfit for nourishing through the scantiness of which lively Liquor it is no wonder if the inflowing and begged heat of the Stomack do suffer CHAP. XCIX A Sixth Paradox 1. In what manner Foods are not for hurt 2. A Paradox out of the Text of holy Scriptures against the Dietary part 3. It is proved also 1 by an Experiment 2. From the destributive Justice of God 3. From the indication or betokening of Remedies 4. From a Rule 4. From whence the necessity of a Diet came 5. One Precept 6. The praise of Sobriety 7. How the Waters may pass speedily thorow the Midriffs 8. A Purgation 9. The manner and requisites of drinking How much is to be drunk 10. A commendation of Elecampane prepared 11. The sick must drink speedily an why 12. Returning after what manner 13. When he must Dine 14. Whether the Water of the Spaw be to be mixed with pure Wine 15. And indeed after dinner 16. Three Digestions 17. Why he must not sleep after his Dinner at the Spaw 18. The hour of Rest I Will now subjoyn a few things concerning Diet and the manner of using the Waters of the Spaw That thing in the first place through experience being our guide we have seen in the Dietary part of Medicine that the quality of Meats or Foods as such doth no where bring Dammage unless where a weakened bed-rid person and a defectuous Remedy is present For God saw that whatsoever he had made was good and consequently that whatsoever he had ordained for meat was a good food but that its quantity onely is able to hurt For eat thou whatsoever meats thou wilt for example sake and be thou wounded so thou shalt not exceed in quantity and thou hast apt Balsames and consolidating Potions of Wounds thou shalt feel no pressure and no dammage from the Meats no otherwise than as if thou wert nourished with their most delicate choice A Testimony of which thing Souldiers and poor Folks shall give Unto whom the Judge or Arbitrator of things had seemed to have been severe if in Diseases they ought to be fed with Phesants Partridges and other huckstery of Kitchins For Nature despiseth the Rules of curiosity as being defended by that aid that she were vainly to desire a Help and Succours against a Disease by a Remedy which from a small quantity of Food is not able to satisfie the Defects which are to be prevented For whatsoever ought to attempt the single combate of a Disease surely by a stronger right it ought to divert Symptomes which are to arise from Meats that I say which is handed forth or instituted for the brushing off of blemishes or hurts Therefore the necessity of a Diet is believed to have been brought in from the penury of the more profound Medicines and not from the dainty allurements of Foods That one Precept of Diet is to be observed I counsel him that drinks of the Waters of the Spaw that he study Sobriety and that he eat Sparingly like his neighbours For what shall it profit to accuse the Health of our bordering neighbours by the Waters of the Spaw if we live the more deliciously and with too much fullness Therefore let the Supream defence of Long Life although it be a cruel thing to those that are unaccustomed be Sobriety Otherwise those things which savour do nourish best and a hungry Man will easily concoct those Foods which do savour him most By that onely rule of Diet the Waters will pass thorow him safely speedily and pleasantly But besides it shall be profitable to brush off the filth from the Stomack but the more crude and less sincere Chyle from the Meseraick Veines Which shall comodiously be done if one dose of the Pills Rufi being duely prepared and not from the perswasion of gain be for the space of three daies continually taken before the Waters Or if he listeth not to wait the space of three daies let him infuse an ounce and half of Conserve of Roses in eight ounces of the Water of Pouhontius adding thereto a Scruple of Salt of Tartar Let him drink the strained infusion He that is to drink of the Water of the Spaw let him endeavour first to unload his Belly betimes in the Morning and about the Twilight let him drink twelve ounces of Pouhontius and ascend the Mountain From whence when he shall be come down let him drink twenty or thirty ounces of Savenerius at the first of the Morning For he must passe by degrees unto things not accustomed As also Pouhontius shall premeditatingly open the branching passages not with a loaded quantity He must add to the quantity daily even unto a sufferance as every one is his own Judge The which thereby shall be easily conjectured because if they shall drink as much as it behoveth them after the example of Hippocrates they are in a good frame and do easily bear it But at the time of Drinking in stead of Annise Myva or Conserve of Elecampane being taken the Water that is drunk is easily strained thorow the Midriffs But let the appointed dose be speedily drunk seeing the progress of the Fountain is hastened and therefore let the first Water be cocted if indeed that is to be said to be truly cocted which doth not depart into nourishment and expelled before the last Water approach which renders the Action of the native Heat renewed or frustrated He returning from the Fountain to the Village let him slowly proceed that not Sweat but Urine which is in his Desires may be provoked But let the hour of Dinner be when the Stomack shall be dispatched of the Waters least the remainder of the Water being almost concocted should over-hastily bring the crude juyce into the Veines It hath been doubted whether the Water of the Spaw be with conveniency to be mixed with pure or unmixt Wine I will say That so Wines shall be made easily passable and the passages shall be kept passable and therefore with the borderes I shall counsel to admix the Fountains with their Foods that is with their Drinks And therefore because he must eat sparingly about the tenth or eleventh hour he is to go to Pouhontius at the third hour because we
Quick-sighted and provident Nature comes to meet or prevent this same Dryness with a more large Nourishment of Marrow and She would have it to be Fat and less discussable or dispersable by Heates that it may vindicate the Old Age of the Bones from Dryness by its Unctuous Moisture For therefore there is a greater plenty or Marrow in four-footed Beasts that are Aged than in the little Young Ones because there is a greater necessity thereof I therefore do no longer highly esteem of the irrepairable radical Moisture for the Foundation of Life as neither being astonished at Dryness in as much as it is such neither also am I wont to measure out the Life according to the Pleasure of the first Qualities Because I knew that the Life did not wax dry as neither was it to be drawn from the Bosom of the Elements after that I beheld the interchangeable Courses of a long and short Life to be in the Center of Life CHAP. CV The Vital Air. THe Schools have not performed enough in teaching that Nourishments are transchanged first into Chyle and then from hence into the Digested Juice of Venal Blood and so that in the Liver a natural Spirit is made which by a repeated Digestion in the Heart is formed into vital Spirit and at length that in the Brain it is made animal So as that the natural Spirit should be fit for using the Parts but the Vital for quickning and conserving the same as also lastly that the Animal Spirit should be appointed for the Functions of Sense Motion and of the Mind But moreover in my Judgment it had behoved them more largely to discover the Thingliness and History of the Deed in so long a race of Studies and Repetition of Writers Indeed they know that there is a certain Spirit that Maker of the Assault according to Hippocrates which holds the Stern of Life in its Hand It was to be sought for and pronounced in what Organs or Instruments that Spirit should be made or what it should act and also they ought to have explained every Disposition the Substance thereof and the Properties of its Substance and also the manner of its making I therefore will declare what I may meet with in this respect That therefore we may be led into the Knowledge of the Vital Spirit the Blas of Man should first of all be repeated in this place but least I be tedious I will here omit it and refer the Reader elsewhere unto the Volume of the rise of Medicine I have elsewhere also delivered a Mean or Manner whereby through instilled Ferments an Aqua Vitae may be made of every Plant and Fruit whatsoever Which manner the vulgar Sort hath known and doth exercise while it frameth an Aqua Vitae or Liquor of Life out of Grains Fruits Ale or Beer Hydromel or honied Water no less than out of Juice of the Vine But an Aqua Vitae is a volatile Liquor Oylie indeed as it is wholly enflamed and likewise wholly Salt for as much as being an Air it biteth yea and being but a little while detained in the Mouth it burns and embladders the upper skin of the Gums I in this place taking notice by the way that two Beginnings of Chymistry are one only and an undivideable Simple thing I have shewn also elsewhere after what manner one Pound of Aqua Vitae being combibed in the dryed Salt of Tartar scarce half an Ounce of Salt can be made but that the whole Body may be made an Elementary Water as it was before And so that from hence it is easie to be seen that Water is by Nature a more formerly and simple Body that the Chymical Beginnings themselves While as the Water which at first was not in act in the most expurging or refined Aqua Vitae is nevertheless by its reducement thereby made its first Element of Water The which handicraft Operation moreover by transferring unto the Speculation of Life I find that the Wine in its winy Parts containeth the Aqua Vitae the Water of Life and therefore that is easily quickly and without the digested Maturities of the Liver and Gaul snatched through the Arteries of the Stomack unto the Heart or to be called unto it immediately for the supply and defect of the vital Spirit and in this respect to delude the Opinion of the Schools which presupposeth that the Spirit of the Liver ought to precede For if there be more of the Spirit of Wine in the Stomack than is meet Drunkenness follows to wit as the Spirit of Wine is more largely attracted than can in a fit Interval be changed into Vital Spirit Which thing surely proveth first of all a changing of and also the Operations of a Digestion and Ferment In the next place that also is remarkable To wit that there is a certain more mild Spirit in the Wine a Partaker of another and more noble Quality than that Spirit which is immediately drawn out by Distillation and is called refined or expurged Aqua Vitae The which is easily beheld by the Sight in the simple Oyl of Olives because Oyl being Distilled without the Additaments of Bricks or Tiles and the which therefore is called Oleum Philosophorum differs much from its Oyliness which is extracted the simple Oyl being first reduced into unlike Parts only by the Digestion and Application of the circulated Salt of Paracelsus For truly the circulated Salt is separated the same in weight and antient Qualities from the Oyl after that the Oyl of Olives is disposed into its diverse kinds of Parts For then by this means a sweet Oyl is separated from the Oyl of Olives even as also a most sweet Spirit of Wine from the Wine and that far distinct from the tartness of Aqua Vitae But in us although the meat together with the Drink do after some sort putrifie for that Purefaction is a manner and mean of transchanging a thing into a thing yet in our Digestions the Spirit of Aqua Vitae is not by such a Putrefaction and action of the Ferment of the Spleen drawn out of Potherbs Pulses Bread-Corns or Apples For truly it is not the Intention of our Nature to procreate an Aqua Vitae for it self but there is a far different Ferment in us whereby things are resolved into Chyle And a far different one whereby things do putrifie and are separated into an Aqua Vitae For this Ferment is introduced by many Mediums but that is not attained but by a specifical fermental Property of any Species For while Herbs through a long steeping in Water are made to putrifie by their Ferment or Vicar for the extracting of an Aqua Vitae the stalke branches and entire Leaves remaine in their Figure and Hardness the which notwithstanding being chewed swallowed and well concocted within do in a few hours depart into Chyle and loose the first Nature of Herbs Wherefore I have also elsewhere pressed to wit that there are as many specifical digestive
retorted or struck back by an Alembick it returns into its antient weight of water Yet it may be doubted whether water consumed by the cold of the air is not changed into the nature and properties of air Because after the floud the Almighty sent the windes that they might dry the face of the Earth And even unto this day water is sooner supt up under the most cold North than in Summer heats Also a Fountain falling into a place or Vessel of Stone or Marble under the most chilled cold with a continuall Gulf the motion of the steep falling Fountain hinders indeed the water from congealing yet a certain vapour is seen to ascend which being straightway invisible is snatched away in the Air. That which is presupposed is that the every way nature of air is at least consumed by cold if not by heat First of all I answer that absurdity being granted the Schooles in the first place have not any thing for themselves from thence that therefore the air by it self should be moyst so far is it that the air as they determine should be far moyster than the water Because it is at least water dried up For that which is transchanged doth alwayes loose the properties which it had in the terme or bound from which and borroweth the qualities of the thing transchanging For however either the whole air was sometimes water or that onely should be moyst which was born of water but the other first-born air should be dry from its Creation And so there should be two aires essentially different But that the air in its own purity is dry by an inward property it appeares from the objection of the aforesaid cold because if the air from its Root were moyst windes had not been sent to dry the Earth But if indeed through the windes the waters of the floud were truly changed into air there should be much more air after the floud than before Consequently either some part of the World had been empty or certainly now by reason of a pressing together and thickning caused by a new air of so great an heap we should be choaked which thing shall hereafter be manifested by the handicraft operation of a Candle or an equall part of air ought successively to had been annihilated or brought to nothing under the generation of so great a new air For the Text will have it that so deep waters and the whole superficies of the Earth also was dryed by the windes Or if before the floud the waters had been air in the floud-gates of Heaven in like manner therefore in the whole floud there had been an emptiness in those floud-gates of Heaven to wit if the water be thicker and more condensed by a hundred fold at least than the air Therefore I lay it down for a position That the water doth never perish indeed not through cold or that it can be changed by any endeavours of nature or art and likewise that the air in no ages or by no dispositions not so much as in one onely small drop can be reduced into water For the water doth not endure an emptiness as neither the co-pressing of it self in being pressed together by any moover Onely it is pressed together in a seminall in-thickning through a formal transchanging of it self But on the contrary the air cannot subsist without a Vacuum or emptiness which thing I will prove in its Chapter and therefore it suffers an enlarging and straightning of it self Therefore there are two stable Elements differing in nature and properties among themselves because it is impossible for them to be changed into each other I confess indeed that out of the Stone-Vessel of a Fountain a watery exhalation doth ascend like a mist from the smallest Atomes of the water which exhalation although departing but a little from thence it be made altogether invisible it doth not therefore corrupt the Doctrine delivered For truly of one equall agent there is one onely and equall action Wherefore if cold doth first change the water into an icy exhalation the same cold cannot afterwards have another action upon that exhalation than of more extenuating and dispersing the same so as that through its fineness it may soon be made invisible And afterwards may be made more and more fine For neither could the hundredth extenuation of the same exhalation more transchange the water than the first Because it is an Element and Body impossible by its appointment to be reduced into a greater simplicity since subtilizing made by the division of parts is nothing but a certain simple shifting For example Beat Gold into Plates and then into the thinnest leaves but thence into the Gold of Painters straightway again make it smooth or plain in a Marble Morter And then with minium or red Lead and Salt bring it into an impalpable or exceeding fine Powder seperate the minium by the fire and wash away the Salt with water and repeat or renew it often as thou listest At length also with Sal armoniac Stibium and Mercurie Sublimate drive it through a retort and renew that seven times that the whole Gold may be brought into the form of a flitting Oil of a light red colour For it is a very smooth yea and a hard sound that which may be hammered and a most fixed Body which now seemeth to be turned into the nature of an Oil. But truly that dissembled Liquor is easily reduced into its former weight and body of Gold What if therefore Gold doth not change its antient nature by so many manglings nor doth by any meanes loose its own seed much lesse doth water a thing appointed for a simple Element by the Lord of things for the upholding of the Universe Although water should be potent in the three divulged Beginnings and should truly consist in Salt Sulphur and Mercurie mingled together yet it suffers no seperation of the same things by reason of the most exquisite simpleness of its nature and the most firm continuance of its constancy For Bodies when they are made subtile or fine to the utmost that they could be no more fine if they should continue in making them fine at length they depart into another substance with a retaining of their seminall properties And in this respect the Alkahest of Paracelsus by piercing all Bodies of nature transchangeth them by making them subtile Which happens not in the Elements Water and Air because by reason of their highest simplicity and priority of their appointment they refuse to passe or to be transchanged into any thing that is before or more simple than themselves Therefore when exhalations being gotten with child by the odours or smells and seeds of compound Bodies are translated from the lower parts to the middle Region of the air there through the most subtile dividing of the vapours by cold as much as is possible for nature to do they are reduced indeed into their most simple and primitive purity of Elementary water but in
water pressed together into the room of one part where Gold is framed of water Wherefore so far is it that the piercing of dimensions becomes impossible seeing that nothing is more natural or home-bred to nature than to co-thicken the body of the water but indeed although there may something appear in the water like to the three first things yet also there is no hope that they should be rent asunder from each other because in the every way simplicity of the water an adequate or suitable Sulphur is after a certain sort hidden which cannot be seperated from the other two but they all do accompany together Those are not the three true Principles which are abstracted or seperated onely by the Imagination The water therefore since it doth on every side vary off-Springs according to the diversity of their seedes thus so many kindes of Earths Mineralls Salts Liquors Stones Plants living Creatures and Meteors do rise up in their particular kindes from the blast or inspiration of the seedes For the water putrifies by continuance in the Earth is made the juyce of the Earth Gums Oyl Rosin Wood Berries c. and that which of late was nothing but water materially now burns and sends forth a fume or smoak Not indeed that that fume is air but is either a vapour or a drie exhalation and a new fruit of the water not yet appointed to be wholly turned by its seed It is proved For the Body of the air cannot make a shadow in the air but whatsoever doth exhale out of a live Coal doth make a shadow in the Sun For since the air hath a limited consistence and thickness and that agreeable to its own simpleness it followes that whatsoever is thicker than the air that is not air Moreover that which being made thin by the heat of the fire doth now exhale is as yet thicker than the air and so for that cause makes a shadow surely that shall become far more thick in the cold and shall be made visible in Clouds Whatsoever exhalations therefore do from the Earth climbe upward and are joyned in Clouds for this cause also those Clouds do stink no otherwise than as water doth under the Aequinoctial line and there the Ferment and Seed of their Concretion or growing together being consumed they are turned into pure water no otherwise than the water is after it hath escaped and overcome the bounds of its putrefaction which it had conceived under the line The dew therefore is a Cloud belonging to the Spring not yet stinking falling down before it can touch the place of cold So a mist or fogg is a stinking Cloud not as yet refined through the putrefaction of its Ferment because as many as have passed over the Alps with me have known how greatly Clouds taken hold of with the hand do stink but the Rain-water collected thence how sweet and without savour it is and almost incorruptible For when any thing doth exhale whether it be in the shew of water or Oil or smoak or mists or of an exhalation although indeed it brings not away with it the seedes of the Concrete or composed Body at leastwise it carries the Ferments upward which that they may be fully abolished from thence and that the remaining matter may return into water it behooves that they be first lifted up into a subtile or fine Gas in the kitchin of the most cold air and that they passe over into another higher Region and do assume a condition in the shape of the least motes or Atomes And that the Ferments do there die as well through the cold of the place as the fineness of the Atomes as it were by choaking and extinguishing For cold is therefore a principle not indeed of life but of extinguishment To wit as it doth sub-divide the parts of the Atomes as yet by more subtilizing them even as I have above taught And so that Woods are also the sooner consumed by fire under cold as if they were driven by a blast From which necessity verily that place was from the beginning alwayes chilled with continuall cold Because the Authour of nature least he might seem to have been wanting to the necessities of his Creature hath every where fitted ordinations according to necessities Therefore cold is naturall and home-bred to that place but not from the succeeding Chymera of an Antiperistasis Indeed the matter of fruits being brought thither must needes return into their first Being and the infections of the Ferments are therefore first to be removed by the mortifications sub-divisions subtilizings piercings choakings and extinguishings of the cold The Air therefore is the place where all things being brought thither are consumed and do return into their former Element of water For in the Earth and water although Bodies sprung up from seedes do by little and little putrifie and depart into a juyce yet they are not so nearly reduced into the off-spring of simple water as neither into a Gas For Bodies that are enfeebled or consumed do straight way in the Earth draw another putrifaction through continuance a ferment and Seed Whence they flee to second Marriages and are again anew increased into succeeding fruits But the fire the death of all things doth want seedes being subjected to the will of the Artificer it consumeth all seminall things but brings over their combustible matters into a Gas. Paracelsus affirms that three Beginnings are so united in all particular principles that one cannot wholly be freed from the other by any help of art But saving the authority of the man our Handicraft-operation containing his secret Samech hath affirmed that which is contrary to his assertion by the Spirit of Wine being turned into an un-savoury water And so neither can that man cover his ignorance Indeed the Spirit of Wine being wholly capable of burning made void of Phlegme or watery moysture and Oil it alwayes for the one half of it passeth into a simple un-savoury and Elementary water by a touching of the Salt of Tartar on it Again the same thing is made by repetition as to the other part For that man was ignorant of the thingliness of a Gas to wit my Invention and next of the properties of cold in the Air yea he thought that the vapour of the water was plainly annihilated which sottishness of that his proper form of speech is least of all to be winked at in so great a Distiller Especially because he would have the Elements to be seperable from feigned Elements rather than the three first things Wherefore from the dissection of the water delivered it now sufficiently appeares that the simple water is not crude or raw and that fire doth not take away the crudity from it which it hath not Because the whole action of the fire is not into the water but into that which is co-mixed with it by accident Galen according to his manner transcribing Diascorides word for word and being willing to measure the Elementary
subdivision is many times re-shaken sub-divided by the colds through which it hath passed This Gas at least should never of its own accord return into its auntient water nor should descend unto the most cold places through which it escaped by climbing upward unless the uppermost Blas of the Stars should force its descent And so the Region of the still air is not void of successive changes but that the Rain doth not there moysten the ground nor the rage of windes serve for the commotion of the waters For since the Gas which it keepes in it self is now reduced to so great a fineness of it self and all its Atomes being as it were roasted with heats in the outward superficies of the Sulphur surely they cannot return into rain unless by a sweet winde they descend to the middle Region where they do re-take the beginnings of coagulating under the luke-warm blowing of the air For a certain alteration opposite to that place from which the Gas departed ought to reduce the Gas into water For a sweet luke-warmth in the still air maketh the Atomes of Gas being covered in their own Sulphur to divide which Sulphur a skin being as it were broken thorow or like a Glasse that is brought suddenly from luke-warmth into the cold is broken and so the Mercury of the water doth dissolve its Salt at the dissolution whereof the Sulphur it self may be melted into its former water And that kinde of inversion or turning in and out of the body of the water and that torture through the exact searching of the cold is necessary that all the power of the Ferment may be wholly taken away out of the Clouds For else much corruption and the much stink of mists would soon destroy mortalls As in Silver being melted the exceeding small atomes of Gold do slide to the bottom So do the atomes of the Gas settle and by sliding they do increase or wax bigger which otherwise being infirm by reason of the coldness of the Air are again lifted up unless a gentle or favourable luke-warmth in the coldest place did now and then hinder it For so indeed rains shoures storms so Hail Snow mist and Frost are through an alteration by accident having arisen as well from a motive as an alterative Blas in the most cold places And so Gas and Blas have divided the whole Common-wealth of a Meteor into Colonies In like manner I have learned by the examples cited that the Sun doth not heat by accident but by it self and immediately And that heat is as intimate and proper to it as its light is to it The Air hath therefore its grounds or soils no lesse than the Earth which the Adeptists do call Peroledes Therefore the invisible Gas is entertained in the various Beds or Pavements of the Air if the Water hath its depths of its Gulfs it s own Gates are in the Peroledes which skilfull men have called the Floud-gates and folding doores of Heaven For neither is Gas falling down into the place of Clouds carried out of the depth of Heaven without its directer Blas Yea it falls not down but thorow ordained Pavements and folding-doores For all the folding-doores do not promiscuously lay open to the Planets but all the Planets in particular are by their own Blas the Key-keepers of their own Perolede Which thing I submit to be examined by Astrologers that are the shewers or disclosers of Meteors and I promise that they shall finde out a rich substance For so windes do sometimes hasten perpendicularly downwards and smite the Earth but otherwise they go side-wayes out of their folding-doores they beat down Houses and Trees as also bring miserable destruction on all sorts of Shipping But the more luke-warm Air doth foreshew the Winde to come out of the depth of the Air and the Gas to bring with it the Blas of Heaven downwards Whence Gas is straight-way again resolved into a Vapour and afterwards into rain Indeed Clouds do then appear which not long before were not beheld at any corner of the World Because the invisible Gas slides downward out of the depth of the upper Air the which growes together into vapours and from thence into drops For that is the appointment of the Air that it may continually seperate the waters from the waters But seeing that one part of water is extended at least to a hundred fold of its dimension while it is made a vapour and so much the finer by how much the Gas thereof is sub-divided into the more lesse parts and since there is that order and that law of universe that all things may be carried on for the necessity of man and the preserving of the World Indeed in this respect do heavy things tend upward light things are drawn downward Hence it hath seemed to me that the Blas of the Stars is disturbed into rain and is carried into clearnesses and other seasons as oft as the pluralities of Gas it self in the still Perolede of the air do seem to threaten almost choakings and the too-much com-pressions in the air Yet I am not so carefull concerning the occasionall causes of a Meteor it is sufficient that I have known an exhalation arising from beneath to wit a vapour and Gas to be the materiall cause of every Meteor It sufficeth to have known Blas to be the effective cause by the authority of the holy Scriptures The Stars shall be to you for times or seasons dayes and years This therefore is the unrestable appointment of the water that by proceeding continually upwards and downwards it should answer no otherwise than as the windes by an inordinate and irregular motion do answer to their Blas of the Stars And so the water which existed from the beginning of the Universe is the same and not diminished and shall be so unto the end thereof But I meditate of the Peroledes or Soils of the Air to be as it were the Bottles of the Stars by which they do unfold their Blas even through their determined or limited places for the uses and interchangeable courses of times or seasons And chiefly because the upper and almost still Perolede doth contain the cause why there are windes fruits dewes and especially things pertaining to Provinces For seeing that the winde is a flowing Air and so hath an unstableness in it we must needes finde the locall cause of stability in the more quiet Perolede Therefore the folding-doores are shut or laying open in the Perolede according to the Blas of the Stars which they obey Nor is it a wonder that there are limits or invisible bounds in the air of so great power and capable to restrain a heap for the visible World doth scarce contain another Common-wealth of things and the least one of powers For who will deny that under a Rock or great Stone of Scotland scarce 12 foot broad and deep 30 there is not some division of a Perolede that in the mean time I may be
silent concerning the Equinoctial Line and its wonderfull properties that a Canon being discharged on one side of the Stone not any noyse or trembling should be heard on the other side thereof the which therefore is called a mute one So also we must needes consider that there are side folding-doores or Gates of Peroledes in the Air because the windes going forth for the most part with a side motion are also by the Blas of the Stars agreeably carried a crosse their bounds From the aforesaid Doctrine of Gas I at length object against my self If the water be frozen by cold into snowes Hail and Ice then the water shall not be dissolved by cold into Gas if of a uniform Agent and Patient there ought to be the same action and effect Where I must seriously note That the Water freezeth it self but is not frozen efficiently by another For although cold may be hitherto thought to congeal yet that is onely occasionally not effectively The water therefore after the sense of its measure perceives the cold of the air not indeed a certain absence or privation of heat even as I have already demonstrated by an ordinary example in Helvetia but as a positive cause in a naturall quality For truly first of all it is without doubt and is manifest by the sight that the cold Air doth by degrees consume Water Snow and Ice yet these two more slowly and the other more swiftly In the next place it is easie to be seen that whatsoever the Air thus privily steales away that presently for that very cause passeth over into an invisible Gas If therefore the cold of the Air should harden water into Ice a further action of the Air would also the Ice being now made continually cease but the consequent is false therefore also the Antecedent For the Sulphur of the water doth easily wax dry and is divided by the cold wherefore the Mercury and Salt of the water perceiving the frost of the Air that would seperate the Waters from the Waters and that they ought to suffer the extension and drying up of their Sulphur and so an alltogether violent impression of the seperater and that they do desire to remain as they are Hence the whole water at once doth arm it self by a Crust that it may resist the seperater Which thing indeed it could not accomplish but that also some part of the Sulphur hath already suffered an extenuating of it self and so also in this respect the Ice doth swim upon the water But that the Sulphur of the water although it was extenuated in the Ice yet hath not laid aside the nature of water is proved by handicraft-operation Fill a glassen and great Bottle with pieces of Ice but let the neck be shut with a Hermes Seal by the melting of the glasse in the same place Then let this Bottle be put in a balance the weight thereof being laid in the contrary Scale and thou shalt see that the water after the Ice is melted shall be weightier by almost an eighth part than it self being Ice Which thing since it may be a thousand times done by the same water reserving alwayes the same weight it cannot be said that any part thereof was turned into air For such is the continuance and constancy of the Elements that although the water departs into a vapour into Gas into Ice yea into composed bodies yet the auntient water alwayes materially remaineth in some place masked by ferments and seedes coming upon it and else-where onely by the importunities of the first qualities made to differ in the Relolleum of Paracellus that is without a seed But from what hath been said before Some remarkable things do arise 1. That the water hath a certain kinde of sense or feeling and so that all Beings do after some sort partake of life Come let us worship the King by whom all things live 2. Seeing that the water doth not incrust it self in the fabrick of a vapour therefore a vapour as well in the cause as in the manner is more acceptable to the water than a Gas is And that thing doth argue in the water something like to choice 3. And that therefore a vapour doth sooner return into water than into Gas 4. That the changing of water into a vapour is in respect of the seperater oblique or crooked and as it were by accident but that Gas consisteth of a proper appointment of the air whereby the air doth seperate the waters from the waters 5. That the air is far more cold in it self than the water 6. That it is dry by it self 7. That the unity or connexion of entire parts is as acceptable to nature as the dividing of the same is to things opposite 8. That the fabrick of Gas shall afford another intimate principle to the water since it hath not a compositive beginning or part that is the cause of some small difference of kinde besides that which is touched by heat in the rise of a vapour 9. That all created things by how much the more simple they are by so much the more of the same kinde yet an every way most simple homogeniety or sameliness of kinde is not found in bodies 10. That the Sulphur of the water being extenuated in the Ice is the cause of smoothness in congealed things but not the enclosing of a forreign air because alwayes and every where water doth exclude the Wedlock of air 11. That the cold and dryness of the air can act nothing else into the water but to extenuate its Sulphur But that the congealing or hardening it self is an action proper to the water whereby it puts a stop to the seperater 12. That the air acts upon the water without the re-acting of this and the suffering of the air since it is appointed by divine right the seperater of the waters 13. That even in unsensible naturall things re-action differeth from resistance For truly there is no re-action of the water on the air and yet the water is with a resistance 14. That the Schooles have erred because they have dictated every action of nature to be made with a re-acting of the Patient and a suffering of the agent 15. That the changing of Gas into air is impossible 1. For otherwise the air should alwayes increase into a huge body and by consequence all water had long since failed 2. Because besides that which I have elsewhere demonstrated that the air can by no meanes return again into water the same thing is manifest from the but now aforesaid particulars 3. For truly it is proper to water to suffer by air and not likewise to re-act on the air Therefore air being once made by water should alwayes remain air seeing a returning agent is wanting which may turn air into water 4. But for air by it self to return into water opposeth a generall Maxim That every thing as much as in it lies doth desire to remain in it self 5. Especially because air
wants in it self a dissolutive principle of it self caused by the rottenness and interchangeable course of parts 6. If air should at any time be made water that thing should especially be while air is pressed beneath the water And if in water there should be the action of water it should then chiefly obtain its effect upon that air Therefore fill a Glass Bottle half full of water and stop its mouth with a Cork that nothing may breath out then shake the vessel strongly a thousand times upwards and downwards that all the water may as it were froath into bubbles At length notwithstanding thy pains thou shalt not finde air to have departed into water or water into air 7. If therefore water doth not change air into it self otherwise a natural agent works to this end that it may make the Patient like it self there is no other thing afterwards whereby the air may be made water Where as it were by a Parenthesis it comes to be noted that the aforesaid Maxim looseth its universality and truth not onely in the Elements where a mutuall action happens among each other without a desire of changing one into themselves but also in the Heavens yea and also in very many compound bodies For neither doth Mercury in its whole and indivisible substance therefore kill lice that it may make them like it self So neither doth Amber draw Chaffe that thereby it may make it Amber Therefore by a strawie argument the Maxim of the Schooles falls to the ground which otherwise is blown away with a light winde 8. For if air were changed into water that would chiefly happen where those two Elements are co-mixed with each other in their smallest parts for that is in the Clouds But in the Clouds this comes not to passe because in whatsoever place degree manner and quality the air hath touched on the superficies of the water the water is alwayes lessened by the air never at any time increased Therefore there is no action of water into air for if there were any it should be in the hollow superficies of the air where the force of the Element of water residing in its native place is strongest and most conjoyned but there the air consumeth the water because it divides it into a vapour Therefore air never departs into water 10. Seeing therefore no Element hath in it self a Root by which it being as it were affected with wearisomness may change it self into another Element for truly every transmutation proceedeth from a duality or a twofold thingliness elsewhere but there is not a voluntary desire in an Element of dying and converting into another and an appetite appointment and necessity of increasing of nourishing of exchanging it self or of changing the nature in which it was created of God is wanting 11. Vain therefore is the contentious co-mingling of Elements in compound bodies and frivolous is the transmutation of one into another seeing none of the Elements is careful for the passing over of its being from another nor from it self Wherefore I have first concluded with my self that the water and air are primary Elements nor that they can ever make a retrogression or return 12. For the blessed Parent of Nature would not that the Elements should be hostilely opposite and applied that they should breath forth mutuall destruction and devouring continually and that they should be so often made fail and with so many daily formall privations should rise again from death unto their former state without the interposing of a more simple mean Which mean surely should otherwise be desired to be a partaker as well of air as water and yet ought to be neither of these 13. Therefore the holy Scriptures do name the air the seperater but not the destroyer or annihilater of the waters Nor is it right that the air should be drawn to other offices than those which are enjoyned to it by the Workman and Lord of things 14. Finally rarefying or condensing do not change the essential form of the water because they are materiall dispositions destitute of an Archeus 15. Moreover if water having suddenly taken to it a ferment and seed be transchanged into a concrete or composed body Yet that is perpetuall to it by an Elementary priviledge as neither therefore that it ever layes aside the matter of Elementary water 16. It is granted indeed to seeds to frame their composed bodies out of water and to act their Tragedy by the defluxion of forms untill death But the forms of composed bodies do not therefore destroy the simplicity of water and sameliness of its form Much less than the Soul coming suddenly on a body doth destroy the form of flesh For subordinate forms do every where in composed bodies suffer together with each other Therefore much more doth the form of a composed body suffer also the form of its own Element to be untouched Last of all although the air by its greatest coldness doth change the water into Gas yet it never desisteth from the office of Seperater of the waters So that if its cold be restrained at least by its dryth it ceaseth not to raise a vapour out of the water For the action of the Heavens in their circumvolving is uncessant and next also the obedience of the air and water is continuall yea there is an interrupted thread in the acting of all seminall things For truly created things do alwayes respect the will of their Creator which man alone neglecteth CHAP. XIV The Blas of Meteours 1. What Blas is 2. The Blas of a Star worketh more famously by locall motion than by light 3. What the Motive Blas of the Stars is 4. What the Winde is and whence it may be moved 5. That the Stars are made for us 6. Divers activities in Blas 7. That the activities of the Stars are brought down by Blas the executer of motions 8. The errour of Paracelsus 9. The two great Lights do work their own properties 10. How the influences of the Stars may be reduced under the two Lights 11. The Births of rains and Meteors 12. Putrefactions by continuance do arise straightway after the sliding down of the Waters whence are the Ferments and seeds of things 13. A History of Cyprus 14. A resolving of a Question touching the rest or quiet of the Summer-air and the continuall breathing of the Winter-air THE Stars are to us for signes times or seasons dayes and years Therefore they cause the changes seasons and successive courses or interchanges To which end they have need of a twofold motion to wit locall and alterative But I signific both these by the new name of Blas And they do rather stir up a Blas by their mooving through a place than by their light Indeed in a dark night the South winde oft-times followeth the blowing North-windes and this likewise it Therefore because Blas breaths forth a luke-warm winde it hath need not of the heat or light of Heaven it self but of place direction
should go to ruine no otherwise than as doth very often happen in the burrowes of Mines Where those that dig Mettalls are stifled not through want of air abounding nor also alwayes through a choaking poyson but especially for that the air in the Burrowes being filled by the Gas of the Minerall is not renewed And so from hence it also happens that the Lights and Lamps are presently of their own accord extinguished together with the diggers Wherefore they do beat the Burrowes very much and do draw out the air that is filled up with the exhalation with divers Engines and powre on them and inspire into them new air But the air doth refuse too much exhalation no otherwise than as the water doth of the air and any other thing violently coupled with it in the same Mine Let there be a brassen Bottle in whose bottom let the water be A the air B the neck C the hole of the Bottle D by which with a Sypho or Pipe the air may be strongly snuffed up But then let the neck be rowled about that it may violently withhold the air under it I say therefore that while the neck is again swiftly rowled about that it gives utterance to the air For it shall not onely snuffe up the air B that is pressed together but also together with it A shall wholly fly upwards with a great force The air therefore doth sustain an unvoluntary co-pressing of its emptiness therefore it also brings up the water A with it which surely sheweth that a vacuum is more pleasing than the pressing together of the air because it is that which approacheth to the unvoluntary penetration of a body Now therefore of a vacuum an impossible thing with Aristotle is made a thing ordinarily required of nature Notwithstanding those porosities of the air however they may be actually void of all matter nevertheless they have in them a Being a Creature that is some reall thing not a fiction nor a naked place onely but that which is plainly a middle thing between a matter and an incorporeall Spirit and neither of the two I say of the number of those things which in the beginning of the Chapter concerning forms I have denied to be a substance or accident It is the Magnall or sheath of the air the which seeing it hath not in created things its like therefore it refuseth to be made manifest by that which is like unto it The Magnall indeed is not Light but a certain form assisting the air and as it were its companion and as it were conjoyning to it by a certain Wedlock An assistant I say not conjoyned to its essence and therefore an associate in its pores To wit by this the Blas of the Stars is immediately and without hinderance extended on every side and by a momentany motion but not by a thousand generations of a thousand kindes finished as it were at one onely moment as oft as the light or heavenly influences do strike inferiour bodies These very things are the fables of the Schooles to wit least they should be compelled to grant one accident to passe over from subject into subject they had rather that a thousand generations of a thousand particular kindes of light should be made in an instant while the Sun doth at so far a distance shake his beams at us For that which the Schooles do in this respect determine to be as an unpossible thing I will teach to be the ordinary course of nature in the entrance of Magnum oportet Now therefore the natures of Gas and Blas are sufficiently manifest and which way Blas may descend unto us The Doctrines of the Schooles concerning the windes are to be added First of all the Schooles of Aristotle do teach that the winde is a dry exhalation but not an air lifted up from the Earth by the vertue of heat the which when it is hindered by a Cloud from climbing upwards it as furious runneth down side-wayes and effecteth the strength or force of so great an heap or attempt As if it had lost its antient lightness through the first repulse of the Clouds and that therefore being mad it runs down sidewayes as if there were a continuall co-weaving of the Clouds nor should there in any wise be granted any entrance and any passage to the climbing exhalation being once repulsed by so small a Cloud as though a Bottle filled with air and pressed down under the water but ascending should finde a hand against it and therefore should run down sidewayes thorow the water and as if it had lost its former endeavour upwards for the future so as having forgotten to climbe upwards although it should not finde a continuall Cloud it should wish thenceforward rather to be carried sidewayes For neither have they considered that the side motion of the windes ought to be broken or weakened and also of necessity to be more feeble than its motion upwards and so that the winde is more able to beat down high Towers than to remove or scatter the vaporous Cloud about it Surely in all things I wonder at the subscribed sluggishness of the Schooles through a custom of assenting For Aristotle writes that the Salt of the Sea which notwithstanding he thought to be co-eternall with the World hath its originall from an exhalation he understood not an exhalation in the least because it is that which is volatile or swift of flight and the Salt of the Sea a fixed body for neither can Sea water otherwise sweet fix the volatility or swiftness of an exhalation any more than Sal Armoniac it self also all Metcors and especially windes yea the Earthquake and Comets whereof that of the year 1618 was a thousand times bigger than the Earth likewise small Stones Rocks great Stones he hath dedicated to exhalations alone A suitable Store-house whence so great exhalations should proceed hath been wanting to his Dreams And nevertheless the Schooles subscribe to those trifles nor do they awake out of their drowsie sleep but while Aristotle doth expresly spurn against the faith But Galen thinketh the winder or blast to be vapours lifted up out of the water and Lakes by the force of heat but now and then that it is an air resolved out of a mixt body But both of them he salth to be cold being likened to decrepite age to inbred heat failing and to cold effects surely he stumbling in all and every thing hath hugely spread his childish Dreams for truth For in the time of Galen the art of distilling was not yet made known who never saw Rose-water as neither Argentvive or Quick-silver For he had badly read Diascorides together with Pliny he writing that Quick-silver by reason of its great weight cannot be detained in Leather not in wooden Boxes but is to be kept onely in Cases of Mettall As if one onely ounce thereof should weigh more than an ounce of Lead Wherefore Galen must needs have been deeply and heartily ignorant of the
From whence they do afterwards passe into the Element of water But some Bodies do refuse to be divided into the three things at length the Liquor Alkahest of Paracelsus being adjoyned they decay into a Salt and that Salt is destroyed by passing over into an un-savory water The Art of the fire being despised hath made these things to be unknown in the Schooles But I have not onely a War with those that are ignorant of nature the despisers of the searching mistress of Philosophy but also with Paracelsus the Standard-defender of the Chymists for whom when it was hard to have declined from the beaten Road he sometimes would have those three things to consist in the co-mingling of the Elements and sometimes he thought the Elements of the World themselves not to be bodies but the empty places or wombes of things But in another place he denieth all of whatsoever is corporeall to be Elementary but the Masse onely of the three first things And again in another place he hath taught that the very Elements yea the flame of the fire do reduce themselves by a Method into the four Elements And so they cease to be naked Elements in the place of three principles But the flame it selfe which is nothing but a kindled smoak being enclosed in a Glasse straightway in the very instant perisheth into nothing So that a Glasse made in a glassen Fornace with a bright burning fire and being shut could never contain any thing besides Air. He being unconstant to himself hath made himself ridiculous and all those particular things in fit places are to be refuted by me For the Chymists have hitherto believed that the Elements do lay hid in the three first things For they had seen Air and Fire in burning Wax to fly away together and thereupon they have thought that the water doth in part challenge to its self its air and fire But they have thought that the Earth flies away with the smoak Which thing they have likewise supposed concerning those things which do leave a Coal and ashes behinde them placing ashes in the room of earth But they have believed that the fruits of the Earth and Mineralls are indeed as it were the allied pledges of the water but they have believed them to be stirred up by the Wedlock of the other three Elements but I come to the hand Let there be Aqua vitae excellently well purified from its dregs which burns Oily bodies through its whole Homogeniety or sameliness of kinde for that Aqua vitae by Salt of Tartar which is near akin to it is presently changed as to its 16th part into Salt and all the rest becomes a simple Elementary water And one onely part is made a Salt although it be of the same kinde with the other and so is equally reducible into water because that in actions of bodies and spirits under their dissolving there are made divers coagulations of the dissolver In like manner also in the operation of the fire Salts which before were volatile or swift of flight may partly be co-melted into a fixed Alcali no otherwise than as Salt-peter and Arsenick being both volatile things may be fixed by co-melting Therefore the three first things are not onely seperated but are sharpened changed do vary the nature of the composed body and so are made by the fire a new creature not indeed being created anew but being brought forth by the fire So a sile is no more the earth of the Potter but now a Stone So ashes and smoak are no more Wood nor an Alcali nor Sand Glasse Because the force of the fire doth not produce seeds but by consuming doth transchange them and by seperating alters all particular bodies Moreover none dares to say that the Salt of Tartar in the case proposed doth produce an Element out of that which is not an Element as if a Salt were the Father of the Element of water but the Sulphur of the Wine the seed being taken away doth leave the matter of the Aqua vitae to be such as it is But the part which may be fixed in the Salt of Tartar which hath taken to it the condition of a Salt was fat it being before wholly capable of burning volatile and of the same condition with its fellowes Immediately therefore after the destruction of the seed of the Sulphur of the Wine it is nothing but an Elementary water So every Oil is materially simple water which a small quantity of seed translates into a combustible Masse and playes the maske of a Sulphur And every seed is according to a Chymicall computation scarce the 8200 part of its body which part if the fire shall change into families it shall not be hard for it also to return into water For the fire burning the fatness into Air it wholly flies up to the Clouds and there doth sometimes grow together through the cold of the place into water For Fishes do by the force or virtue of an inbred seed transchange simple water into fat bones and their own fleshes it s no wonder therefore that Fishes materially are nothing but water transchanged and that they return into water by art I will also shew by Handicraft-demonstration that all Vegetables and fleshes do consist onely of water but all things if not immediately at least-wise with an assistant they do again assume the nature of water Also every small Stone Rockie or great Stone and Clay doth passe into a fixed Alcali of its own accord or by things adjoyned for an Alcali is that which before was not a Salt yet its combustion being finished it is a residing Salt So ashes is by its own proper Alcali made a meer Salt But every Alcali the fatness being added is reduced into a watery Liquor which at length is made a meer and simple water as is to be seen in Soaps the Azure-stone c. as oft as by fixed adjuncts it layes aside the seed of fatness For otherwise it is not proper to the fire to make a water rather a flame but onely to seperate things of a different kinde Therefore if water may be made out of Sulphurs and not by the proper transmutation of fire it must needes be that Sulphurs are begotten of meer water For truly neither is water seperated from Oils but that is truly made of these because the water was not in it by a formall act but onely materially to wit the mask of the seeds being withdrawn Moreover every coal which is made of the co-melting of Sulphur and Salt working among themselves in time of burning although it be roasted even to its last day in a bright burning Furnace the Vessel being shut it is fired indeed but there is true fire in the Vessel no otherwise than in the coal not being shut up yet nothing of it is wasted it not being able to be consumed through the hindering of its eflux Therefore the live coal and generally whatsoever bodies do not immediately depart into
water nor yet are fixed do necessarily belch forth a wild spirit or breath Suppose thou that of 62 pounds of Oaken coal one pound of ashes is composed Therefore the 61 remaining pounds are the wild spirit which also being fired cannot depart the Vessel being shut I call this Spirit unknown hitherto by the new name of Gas which can neither be constrained by Vessels nor reduced into a visible body unless the seed being first extinguished But Bodies do contain this Spirit and do sometimes wholly depart into such a Spirit not indeed because it is actually in those very bodies for truly it could not be detained yea the whole composed body should flie away at once but it is a Spirit grown together coagulated after the manner of a body and is stirred up by an attained ferment as in Wine the juyce of unripe Grapes bread hydromel or water and Honey c. Or by a strange addition as I shall sometime shew concerning Sal Armoniack or at length by some alterative disposition such as is roasting in respect of an Apple For the Grape is kept and dried being unhurt but its skin being once burst and wounded it straightway conceiveth a ferment of boyling up and from hence the beginning of a transmutation Therefore the Wines of Grapes Apples berries Honey and likewise flowers and leaves being pounced a ferment being snatched to them they begin to boyl and be hot whence ariseth a Gas but from Raysins bruised and used for want of a ferment a Gas is not presently granted The Gas of Wines if it be constrained by much force within Hogs-heads makes Wines â—urious mute and hurtfull Wherefore also the Graâ—e being abundantly eaten hath many times brought forth a diseasie Gas For truly the spirit of the ferment is much disturbed and seeing it is disobedient to our digestion it associates it selfe to the vitall spirit by force yea if any thing be prepared to be expelled in manner of a Sweat that thing through the stubborn sharpness or soureness of the ferment waxeth clotty and brings forth notable troubles torments or wringings of the bowels Fluxes and the Bloudy-flux I being sometimes in my young beginnings deluded by the authority of ignorant writers have believed the Gas of Grapes to be the spirit of Wine in new Wine But vain tryalls have taught me that the Gas of Grapes and new Wine are in the way to Wine but not the spirit of Wine For the juyce of Grapes differs from Wine no otherwise than the pulse of water and meal do from Ale or Beer For a fermentall disposition coming between both disposeth the fore-going matter into the transmutation of it self that thereby another Being may be made For truly I will at sometims teach that every formall transmutation doth presuppose a corruptive ferment Other more refined Writers have thought that Gas is a winde or air inclosed in things which had flowen unto that generation for an Elementary co-mixture And so Paracelsus supposed that the air doth invisibly lurk under the three other Elements in every body but in time onely that the Air is visible but his own unconstancy reproveth himself because seeing that he sheweth in many places else-where that bodies are mixed of the three first things but that the Elements are not Bodies but the meer wombs ' of things But he observed not a two-fold Sulphur in Tin and therefore is it lighter than other Mettalls whereof one onely is co-agulable by reason of the strange or forreign property of its Salt whereby Jupiter or Tin maketh every Mettall frangible or capable of breaking and brickle it being but a little defiled with its odour onely but that the other Sulphur is Oily For Gun-powder doth the most neerly express the History of Gas For it consisteth of Salt-peter which they rashly think to be the Nitre of the Antients and the which is at this day plentifully brought to us being dried up from the inundation of Nilus of Sulphur and a Coal because they being joyned if they are enflamed there is not a Vessel in nature which being close shut up doth not burst by reason of the Gas For if the Coal be kindled the Vessel being shut nothing of it perisheth but Sulphur if the Glasse being shut it be sublimed wholly ascends from the bottom without the changing of its Species or kinde Salt-peter also being melted in a shut Vessel as to one part of it gives a sharp Liquor that is watery but as to the other part it is changed into a fixed Alcali Therefore fire sends forth an Air or rather a Gas out of all of them singly which else if the air were within it would â—end forth from the three things being connexed Therefore those things being applied together do mutually convert themselves into Gas through destruction But there is that un-sufferance of Sulphur and Salt-peter not indeed by the wedlock of cold with hot as of powerfull qualities as is believed but by reason of the un-cosufferable â—lowing of boyling Oil and Wine no lesse than of water or of Copper and Tin being melted with Wine For in so great heat when they co-touch each other throughout their least parts they are either turned into a Gas or do leap asunder For so Lead being roasted with Mercury and Sulphur departeth into a sudden flame a small lee or dreg being left almost of no weight yet enlarged to the extension of the Lead VVherefore if the Gas were air all the Gun-powder should be air and the Lead it self should be wholly air But it is not possible for the fire to produce out of the same Elementary fruit sometimes air sometimes water with an ultimate reducement unlesse the fire loose also its uniformity of working that was planted in it by the Creator In the next place it is already above sufficiently manifested that air and water can never be brought over into each other Therefore if Gun-powder or Salt-peter may observably be reduced into an Elementary water by fire or any other mean whatsoever a transmutation thereof into air is not possible to be But some thousands of pounds of Gun-powder being at some time enflamed at once have not yielded any thing but an inflamed Gas which hath growen together in the Clouds and at length returning into water Furthermore a Coal is reduced in some Fountains into a Rockie stone Likewise I have known the meanes whereby the whole of Salt-peter is turned into an Earth and the whole of Sulphur being once dissolved may be fixed into an Earthly Powder What if therefore these three Earths should contain three or four Elements at leastwise the Earth should occupie the greatest part nor that reducible into its former Gas neither is it consonant to Reason that a Body which wholly flies away into an aiery Gas should be converted into Air or into Earth as man listeth Next seeing the three aforesaid Powders are at length made water under the Artificer which afterwards cannot any more through humane cunning return into
void to wit after a twofold manner without form because it was spoiled of naturall endowed vertues as well in its own body as in the places of its retirances which thou shalt thus behold For although the Air do flow under the Blas of the windes yet light because it is immediately in place and mediately in the Air remaineth stable For if light may be thought to flow together with the Air even at every instant in the flowing of the Air light should be generated anew Thou mayst know that the light is in very deed a Being without a shining light For I keep a Flint in my possession which if I shall expose to the Air the Sun existing above the Horizon for the space of three or four pauses at least neither also is it materiall whether the day shall be clear or clowdy and from thence shall bring it into a dark place it keepeth the conceived light of the Sun perhaps for some such like space And that is done as oft as the aforesaid enlightning is repeated And so from hence it is manifest that light is a Being subsisting immediately in place nor having another Being of inherency besides the placed essence of it self seperable from a shining Creature And so if it depart from the Air into a stone that it might also passe from the Air into the next Air if its immediate existence were in the Air and not in place For truly it is alike to light to wander out of place its immediate subject into the Air or into the Flint in that is only the difference that the essence of light doth not subsist in the Air besides the continuall warmth or nourishing of shining as neither doth the flame without a combustible smoak But if it hath the Flint a fit retaining place for it self as it comes to passe when fire possesseth Iron it remaineth therein for some time For hence it comes to passe that the sight doth at one instant perceive its object because as well light as colour is immediately in place but in the Body of the Mean as it were by accident and secondarily For seeing place is its subject it findes not resistance in transparent placed Bodies but in one onely moment light is shaken from the eight Sphear even on the Earth But Sound or the object of hearing is immediately in the Case of the Mean and walketh without the flowing of the Air from subject into subject Although the Schooles in this thing are made half deaf But an Odour or smell is not dispersed without that which is odourable which is the Gas of a thing which is dispersed thorow the emptinesses or Magnall of the Air. And the Magnall is a Case or Sheath wherein every Gas is reduced into its first matter of water Therefore not onely lights and colours do inhabit in places as it were immediate guests but Ferments Reasons and therefore they are placed by the Creator the Word that they may be the Roots of successive seeds even to the end of the VVorld Therefore Mineralls are not promiscuous every where but certain Mineralls in set years and places For Suevia is as rich in Copper as Cyprus in times past could be Therefore cold is guiltless as heat is vain to the constitutions of their seeds For places which have wanted Mines in times past will at sometime in their day their seed being ripe restore Usuries not unlike to the more rich ones because the Roots or Ferments of Mineralls do sit immediately in place and do breath without disdain for fulness of dayes The which when it hath compleated a seed then the Gas environing the water in the same place receiveth a seed from the place which afterwards begets the Sulphur of the water with childe condenseth the water and by degrees transplants it into a Minerall water For it oft-times happeneth that a digger of Metalls in Mines breaking great Stones asunder the Wall cleaves or gapes and affords a chink from whence a small quantity of water of a whitish-green colour hath sprung which hath presently grown together like to liquid Sope I call it Bur and afterwards its greenish paleness being changed it waxeth yellow or growes white or becomes more fully green For thus that is seen which else without the wound of the stone comes to passe within because that juyce is perfected by an inward efficient Therefore the first life of a metallick seed is in the Buttery or Cellar of the place plainly unknown to man But when as the seed comes forth to light cloathed with a Liquor and Gas hath begun to defile the Sulphur of the water there is the middle life of the seed But the last life is when it now waxeth hard But the last life of the metallick seed is the first life of the Metalls or at leastwise very nearly conjoyned to it But while that Masse doth breath Sulphur and shuts up its Mercury within then I say is the middle life of Metalls But their last life is when it hath attained a fixedness and the proper stability of a vein Wherefore there is a more manifest progress of a life and seed in Metallick Bodies than in the two fellow Monarchies For that Metalls do not require a figure nor their whole Body so exquisite or exact yea if the Image of seeds in things that have life do flow forth from their own Father or begetter surely the typicall Images of Mineralls are to be fetched from the Cellers or Store-houses of divine Bounty Hence also the seeds of Mineralls are not defiled with the filthiness and wantonness of their begetters nor therefore do they offer themselves as monstrous But because they are undefiled therefore they are of famous power in healing Mineralls therefore are to be spoiled of the possession of their last life no more than other things if we do expect obedience from them in healing Else they will bring a feeble help and will bewail that they have come in vain because they have attained the ends of their appointments but are directed for the leaders of whoredoms and Riots I will repeat what I have said above in Eden our Archeus was able fully to subdue all the Archeusses as well of poysons as nourishments into his own increase without any weariness of himself or re-acting of the same poysons or nourishments To wit he could take away every impression of the middle life and overcome it without difficulty For the Archeus was immediately governed by the immortall Soul and so also therefore was not capable of suffering For God not onely made not death in Paradise but moreover neither was there created a Medicine of destruction that is a poyson for man in the Earth But man being straightway cast out into the Earth this Earth clasped Thistles and Thorns that is although our Archeus being Conquerour doth subdue the Archeusses of meats to himself yet the surviving Reliques of strange properties do remain For the last life indeed of meates departeth the middle life
use of the Pulses and another of breathing and â—â—â—ther for heat only For in the most sharp and hot diseases to wit as oft as there is the greatest breathing drawn and that like a sigh the Pulse is small and swift also the strength remaining Therefore the use of breathing and the Pulse do not answer especially because we are more refreshed by a great draught of cold water abundantly drunk than if the same quantity be drunk at many times I say we are more refreshed by one only sigh than by many small and more frequent breathings Even so as a pair of Bellows doth perform more by a great and continual blast than by those that are lesse exact although many whence it may be sufficiently manifested to a well considerate and judicious man that there is another use of the Pulses of greater moment to wit That which respecteth the ferment of digestions Whence I repeat a handicraft operation to wit That at length under the last digestion all our Arterial bloud doth perish and exhale neither that it leaves any dreg behind it Yet whatsoever doth exhale by heat alone all that as well in living as in inanimate things doth leave a dreg behind it the skilfull do call this The dead Head which dreg being at length thus roasted doth resemble a Coale For the action of heat is of it self every where Simple Univocal and Homogeneal differing in the effect by reason of the Matter Therefore if the vitall bloud ought to be wholly so disposed in us that it be at length wholly blown away without a dead head it was altogether necessary that that should happen by some other Mean than that of heat But the aire was alwayes and from the beginning every where the seperater of the waters from the waters This hath not been known in the Schools to wit that the whole Venal bloud that it may depart into a Gas it hath need of two wings to fly the aire and a ferment Wherefore observe thou That as oft as any thing of bloud becomes unfit or is not by degrees disposed of and undergoes its degrees in the outward part of the body that it may wholly throughout the whole be made volatile and capable to flye away or thorow the poâ—es at the same moment now Scirthus's Nodes or Knots and Apostems are conceived but if that thing happen in the more inward part thereof for the most part Fevers Apoplexies Falling evills Asthma's likewise pains and deaths do soon follow Let us see therefore what the aire or what a ferment may conduce hereunto First of all Every muscilage of the earth which else is easily turned into worms likewise Starch Fleshes Fishes c. being once frozen at that very moment do lose their muckinesse and return into water As the aire was once very well combined to the Ice as I have sometimes spoken concerning the weight of Ice and so it is the first degree whereby the aire doth resolve a tough body into water And then under the greatest colds and purest aire we are more hungry yet we sweat and less is discussed out of us with a small and more hard siege or excrement Therefore one that saileth in the Sea eats more by double if not by treble unlesse he be sick and le ts go less excrement than himself doth living at Land whence is the Proverb The water causeth a promoting of digestion As if indeed he that saileth should not float in the aire but in the water but floating doth renew the aire in us and from hence there is a stronger digestion Therefore if we do eat more strongly and do cast forth less excrements it necessarily follows that the more is discussed or doth vanish out of the Body which is to say That the more pure Northern and Sea-aire doth conduce to a transpiration or evaporation of the body or doth dispose the bloud unto an insensible perspiration or breathing out of it self Surely for that cause is breathing made not indeed that the air may depart into nourishment for the vitall spirit but that it may be connexed with it being sucked to it thorow the Arterial Vein and Venal Artery of the Lungs and that the air being for this cause transported into the heart it may receive a ferment which accompanying it they both may dispose the venal blood into a totall transpiration of it self After another manner many things are made fixt and do resist a breathing forth if they are provoked by heat otherwise they were in themselves volatile Wherefore an Alcali is not generated in ashes by the fire essentially although effectively it proceed from thence For the office of the fire is indeed to kindle consume and seperate yet not to produce any thing Seeing the fire is not rich in a seed it is the very destroyer of seeds But from seeds all Generation proceedeth When therefore an Alcali is fixed out of a Salt that was before volatile it is not a new production of a thing but only the Alteration of a thing For the Alcali was indeed materially in the composed body before burning and did flow together with its Mercury and Sulphur Notwithstanding while the fire takes away the Mercury and Sulphur the Salt indeed as being a principle more subsisting in the melting of the combustion doth snatch to it self the neighbouring part of the Sulphur or Fat and when it is not able sufficiently to defend it from the torture of the fire it partly also flyes away under the mask of a Gas and attains the odour of corrupted matter and is partly incorporated in the laid-hold-of co-melted Sulphur and is made a true Coal Wherefore the Sulphur being now fixed by the wedlock of the Salt it doth not speedily incline from a Coal into a smoaky vapour But by degrees and not unlesse in an open Vessel and so with the former Sulphur for from hence the Sulphur of a thing being for the most part sharp doth retain the savour of a volatile Salt and at length with the Coalie Sulphur the just weight of its volatile Salt flies away Which thing surely is no where more manifest than in the Coal of Honey For if this be urged or forced by a shut vessel it remains not changed in a bright burning fire but the vessel being open both do so depart that moreover no remainder of ashes doth ever survive Therefore the Alcali Salt doth fore-exist materially in the composed body before combustion Because all the Salt was formally volatile in the composed body and not in the form of a more fixed Alcali which thing is now especially manifest in the bloud which being wholly volatile exhaleth unsensibly through the Pores without any residence But if it be combusted or burnt it leaveth very much fixed Salt in its own ashes In the next place The wood of the Pine-Tree which affordeth little ashes and less Salt in the preparation of ashes barrelled is by calcining wholly turned into an Alcali For barrelled ashes are brought
meats and drinks than of those lesse exact if the middle life do badly season the Archeus And then which way is it convenient to render meats and drinks which the Lord hath judged good infamous through a tartatous treachery I suppose indeed that it was invented by Tartar Hell or the Infernal when Satan did now conjecture that there would speedily be a banishment of Humours out of the Schools of Medicine And indeed seeing every thing is dissolved by the bursting of the bonds which tie the same it helpeth to have admonished that coagulated things are not made in us by drying up the gowty Chalk excepted neither by Tartar privily existing in us surely much lesse from a stony and limy condition of the Microcosme For that Chalk after the attained thickness of the Sunovie or degenerated spermatick Muscilage is afterwards by degrees dried up Even as elsewhere concerning the Gout After another manner even as any Schirrhous thing and likewise a bole clay muckinesse sand and Duelech are in their beginning coagulated and resolved by seminal beginnings and are far otherwise solved and coagulated than if a stubborn and unchangeable Tartar of any kind of things had of its own free accord yielded a foreign curd in us It is a Sophistication to have accused not the cause for a cause or to have neglected the cause as not the cause which Sophistry if it be wont any where to bring on great straights surely in healing as great as may be full of dangers of life and damnation as also of dammages For one doth well digest and difficulty separate but another doth successfully expell and troublesomely digest Lastly a third doth briefly digest and cause meking but doth vitiously transchange for himself under the command of a foreign seed Therefore it is one thing to chastize a forreign impression of the middle life which consisteth in the concretion or growing together of the thing digested it is another thing to expel or separate that which else being retained would hurt And that is contained by dissolving and expelling Finally if there should be any Tartar in things taken into the body ending at length into a stubborn coagulation which it had treacheroufly brought inward with it it should every where even contain a desperation of healing And in this respect a medicine of destruction in the earth had been framed in nature from the beginning by the Lord of things Last of all Tartar is not in meats as neither in meaty drinks but in the water there is indeed a seed of small stones but that Stone is no more Tartar than a rocky stone is bread wherefore also from a stonifying Seed the presence or power of Tartar can in no wise be concluded Likewise although in superfluities or degenerated venal blood there be a power unto a Duelech or Schirrhus yet not unto Tartar and much lesse that there is Tartar naturally as well in the blood as in superfluous excrements For whatsoever is bred by accident from a foreign and estranged seed and by a Metaphor by reason of its coagulation is likened unto Salt coagulated in wines is onely by an abusive alienation called back unto Tartar For Nature hateth metaphorical and poetical liberties Therefore Tartar is not the internal occasional matter of diseases CHAP. XLIV An erring watchman or a wandering keeper 1. The Schools nod or doubt concerning the four humours 2. The Authours repentance 3. A Position with proofs 4. What muck or snivel is and in what sheath it is generated 5. Who the keeper in the terms proposed may be 6. The unexcusable necessities of the keeper hitherto unknown 7. It is proved that snivel is not the excrement of the Brain 8. The brain is from thence concluded to be most miserable 9. The vanity of Diseases dedicated to a Catarrhe or Rheume 10. Snivel is not made of venal blood 11. An argument from a like suitable thing 12. From the Pose or distillation of the head 13. From the likenesse of the other Bowels 14. From the supposed doctrine of the Schools 15. From the identity or samelinesse of the Archeus 16. From Anatomy 17. From an absurdity 18. From the necessity of stoppage 19. From the constitution of the brain 20. From its scope or aime 21. From experience 22. The rashnesse or heedlessnesse of the Schools in a matter of so great moment and so plain is taken notice of 23. That the excrement of the Ears is brought forth by a vapour 24. A necessity of watchmen or keepers 25. It is proved by the Pose 26. By Hoarsnesse 27. By Coughs 28. The Keeper is an unheard of power 29. The Schools thought both powers to be a certain distemper even in healthy persons 30. A diversity from other powers is proved 31. The testimonies of the keepers 32. A stuffing in the head or descending Rheume is never healthy 33. The Cough is examined 34. A wandring keeper 35. A dry Cough 36. The difficulty of curing from whence it is 37. The Remedies are taken notice of 38. The rashnesse of the Schools 39. Remedies out of Sulphur 40. A twofold Asthma or difficulty of breathing 41. The difficulties of healing 42. The use of the Keeper 43. The erring Watchman of the wind-pipe is the more destructive one 44. Snivel differs from a spitting by reaching 45. That the Keeper differs from the other Faculties in the brain 46. That the Diaphragma or Midriff is pory THe Schools pointing with the finger at the muck or snivel from the Brain and the spittle of Coughs have said Behold Phlegm is one of the four constitutive humours of us And afterwards they alwayes subscribed to themselves That boldnesse in wantonizing increased being confirmed by the prescriptions of so many ages and subscribed authorities of Schools As if the brain had consumed the three other supposed and feigned humours for the nourishment of it self Phlegm onely being excluded although most like to it self and otherwise according to the minde of Galen most fit to be totally transchanged into venal blood Also sometimes the Doctrines of the four Humours being forgotten they have sent away the same muck or snivel no longer as a Phlegm or a snivelly Phlegm but as a superfluity of the brain being as it were a banished enemy a superfluity resulting from digestion It hath deservedly shamed them of that their own Doctrine because they have acknowledged snivel to be an excrement of the last digestion but not any longer a humour produced in the Liver as it were one part of four of venal blood For an excrement resisteth a vital humour Therefore they do oftentimes nod and stagger and doubt again while they do promiscuously point out a snivelly man to wit from that dung and diseasie affect to be Phlegmatick and afterwards they thereby measure and divine of his strength wit manners and fortunes In the mean time the Beginnings of the Schools are unfortunate which from an excrement known to themselves do denominate the essence existence properties of
findeth out measures as well according to extent in length breadth depth c. as in the division of weights to wit it hath appointed Axles or Diametrical distances and far removings so that all the consideration from thence is artisicial and therefore also changeable in the samelinesse and unity of one body And therefore weights as such do never act or re-act on each other naturally or by a co-mixture of their own properties although they seem to act something artificially For so the light suffers nothing although the continuation of light be hindered by a suffering wall For otherwise if the lesse weight should in very deed re-act on that which out-weigheth it the weight it self should be rather lessened in the thing weighing for a continuance and actually and not only with respect to the ballance so that a pound thenceforth should not any longer weigh a pound as before And seeing nothing is changed or taken away from the weights on either side it is manifest that there are onely artificial relations of moving strengths but not a true re-action of the lighter weight For as long as a pound doth weigh a pound nothing is attained or hath suffered in that pound by another opposite weight but on both sides one is external forreign by accident to the other and limitable by a relative foundation that it may be readily serviceable to humane considerations And whatsoever thus acteth in our power or seemeth to re-act acteth in very deed nothing But as to that which pertaineth unto other moving strengths If an impressive force of strength doth act indeed by it self but in the mean time be limited by space of place duration or be weakned by impediments or lastly if it act measuringly by reason of figure and hardnesse at leastwise there is never in these any re-acting of the patient or re-suffering of the Agent For example If any one smite on an Anvil with his fist and thereby receives a wound or bruise there is not in that stroak any re-acting of the Anvil or operation of hardnesse or of a corner in the Iron For although the hardnesse doth resist repulsing the smiting fist and the bounds of resistance or repulse may seem necessarily to include some kind of force of re-acting yet it is an improper speech proceeding from the popular errour of the Antients For that is not the reaction of the Anvil but it is the very action of the fist it self which I call a resulting or rebounding one For if the Anvil should truly re-act by hardnesse seeing there is no reason why the Anvil should impart act on the fist and should expect a stroak that it might act for it ought by its whole hardnesse and weight together to act also on a quiet hand and from that very deed done plainly to fret or tear it Neither should the action of the Anvil be limited by the strength of the stroak if there should be a re-acting of the Anvil it self For truly the same thing should happen to the fist whether it had smitten it strongly or in the next place modestly or if at length the opposite fist should rest on it onely because that in either act there was the same hardnesse of the Anvil Wherefore that hardnesse of the Iron acteth or re-acteth nothing by a proper power of acting For there should be a force in the Anvil which in re-acting should be seated throughout its hardnesse and in any stroak should act alike equally and according to its full power but not according to the measuring of the striking fist which is altogether a stranger to the Anvil Therefore in truth the fist doth act simply on the Anvil and the Anvil suffers simply although it took no offence thereby but the fist suffers by accident if it do the more strongly strike the Agent of which suffering is notwithstanding not the Anvil but the fist it self Because there is one only and single action of the stroak and hurt which I therefore call a rebounding one And so the fist suffers and is hurt by it self from its own self but by accident from the strength of the stroak and occasionally from the hardness or figure of the Iron which three things are to be noted in one only stroak For truly that which by accident and occasionally acteth externally only doth not in very deed act by an action of its own and therefore neither is there any re-action as neither action of the Anvil But the smiting and hardness are the occasional means of the wound one whereof to wit hardnesse is a proper occasional and internal thing the other to wit the smiting is accidental by accident In the next place there is another action of a moving strength which hath deceived many with the title of re-acting as while a hand layeth hold of bright burning Iron for the hand in laying hold doth in very deed act and that by it self and the apprehended Iron it self doth suffer in the laying hold but this doth likewise act by a new action indeed but by a far different action in burning the hand for neither is that the scorching of the Iron as being comprehended although that touching be an immediate occasion and cause without which it is not done but it is the proper action of the Iron as being burning bright for so touching and scorching are Beings wholly distinct and separable in the root and so also both their actions differ in their objects though in time of acting they do now and then co-unite Therefore the searing is not a re-acting of the Iron as being laid hold of or it is not the re-acting of comprehension Although in both the sorts of action the acting hand becomes a sufferer because two actions wholly unlike do concur to wit one of the hand laying hold and the other of the Iron burning Again swiftnesse while a Ram or Engine is sore smitten against a wall is not the proper activity of the Agent but it is a measuring of strength imprintingly moving and so is external and by accident Now as in respect of Agents by an altering Blas those do undergo not any thing of re-acting from their own objects because they generate by an absolute dispositive power of their objects which power seeing it is conferred on Nature by God it also acteth without a re-acting For example If the whole Globe of the earth and water should be of meal all that heap would at length be leavened by a leaven of bread being once put into it which verily could not be done if there were but the least re-action of the fermentable body For the small quantity of ferment or leaven should be presently choaked by the more big heap of the Object even as also the seminal spirits do dispose the subjected lump by reason of a faculty conferred on them and in-bred in them and do by a famous prerogative alter it and that without the re-acting of the subjected heap Neither doth that hinder because the stomach cocting
drunk by them from whence they do increase and sustain their own little body so that to other Fishes which eat these small living creatures a Seed is granted to be ingendred in the waters which is passed over into life and is derived into the middle participated life But small living creatures which do immediately make bloud to themselves and their whole substance of water alone have an example almost in every vegetable especially in stony and sandy Mountains which are far seperated from the dung of men wherein perhaps 60 particular kind of Rosinous trees are taken notice of are fully nourished only of rain water and of snow or the Leffas or planty juyce of a stony odour and do grow unto the greatest height being trees so fat that they would be choaked unless they pour forth the same on every side The ferment of the stomack in man doth more easily transchange the meats into chyle than their fatnesses because fatness is more remote from the Latex or the first matter than the meat is Which digestion of transmutation into watery juyces is brought hither to this end that it may be manifest that the Latex a forreign seed and ferment of the members being easily conceived in us is transchanged into a strange off spring And so that out of the Latex I have already shewn above there is next of all a transplanting into an excrementous Snivel where I remember that after drink being abundantly taken in Summer time a muscilaginous spittle which at the time of dry thirst failed was presently after spit out by reaching This is the new History of the humor Latex to be referred unto the treatise of Catarrhs or rheums because the ignorance of that Latex hath given a singular confirmation to conceived Catarrhs as also hath offered rashnesses for things to be conceived CHAP. L. A Cautery or Searing Remedy 1. A Cautery is nothing but a remaining Wound 2. No prerogative of a Cantery made by fire 3. The name of an Issue or little fountain is a Iuggle 4. What things God hath seen entirely good are praised by the Schools as rent or toren 5. The promises of a Cautery are childish 6. The denyal of a Catarrh denyeth the use of a Cautery 7. Ridiculous necessaries for defending Cauteries 8. The position of the Schools is shewn to be absurd and impossible 9. What may be purged by a Cautery 10. Nine conclusions against the appointments of Cauteries 11. Foolish desires or delights in a Cautery 12. Cauteries whom they hurt 13. The undstinction of the Schools 14. The scope or end of a Cautery ceaseth 15. They have circumvented the World by Cauteries 16. That there is no communion of a Cautery with the brain 17. Absurdities following upon the doctrine of Cauteries 18. The one only refuge of the Schools 19. Answers 20. Cauteries are driven against the Rocks 21. What the Schools may answer in the difficulties proposed 22. The multiplying and choosing of a Cautery by what boldness it hath arose 23. Some Stage-play trifles of the Schools 24. The Gowt of Physitians is a mockery 25. Cauteries are foolish 26. They are vain in their own desperate cases 27. It is not yet determined by the Schools in what cases Cauteries can help 28. A case wherein a Cautery profiteth 29. How the cruel and stinking remedy of a Cautery may be prevented 30. A Cautery is unworthy a Physitian CAtarrhs or Rheums have found out Cauteries those therefore being taken out of the way the treatise of these might seem to be in vain unless I should write these things for young beginners I distrusting that my studies will any thing profit the learned or skilful Wherefore I have determined to declare the ends and effect of a Cautery Cauteries therefore are first of all made of fire bright burning Iron a corrosive caustick Medicine yea with the rasour or penknife it self or scissers by cutting off something It is sufficient so the fleshy membrans are broken or pierced with a wound But others do prefer a wound prepared by fire or a caustick Medicine before that which was laid open by cutting Because they think that by actual heat and dryness a flux of humors is the better stopped As if at one only moment the fire should burn any thing besides the escharre it self or should dry up an other thing which they seign is afterwards to flow to the wound Indeed dreams are on both sides greatly esteemed by the Schools For an issue or small fountain for so they call a Cauterized wound that the vulgar may believe diseases to be drawn out as it were by a fountain profits nothing before the escharre be taken away and the footstep of heat and dryness be withdrawn Because the institution of a Cautery hath the avoyding of excrements or superfluities for its object which doth not begin before the decay of the escharre and because it is alway less able to exhale thorow the escharre than otherwise thorow the sound skin therefore successours have accounted it to be all one after what sort soever an issue shall be made so they shall divide that which holds together and keep it divided For that which God hath made whole and entire that it might be very good seems to the Schools that it should be better if it be kept wounded Therefore to be oftentimes wounded and to have kept the wounds open doth conduce to the health of the Schools Surely it s a wonder that they have not transferred to be wounded unto the precepts of defending health even as indeed Cauteriet or constant wounds have been referred thither But in the time of wounding or burning letting out or shedding of blood only doth interpose which ought to excel by that title in the Schools unless the deceit of Phlebotomy or cutting of a vein did manifest it self For they presume and decree that a Cautery is a new emunctory or exspunging place whereby Physitians are able to restrain nature according to their pleasure to unload her self whereby they seign that she doth not indeed otherwise flow down by Catarrhs and unload her self or on every side so doth but only by a hole made That is they cite rheums to appear personally in a place as the Physitian listeth Handsomely indeed if alike truly Notwithstanding these marvels have been so profitable that now Cauteries are also made in Children before the age of three yeers But I first of all have alwaies beheld an implicite blasphemy in a Cautery whereby they openly accuse the Creator of insufficiency in framing the emunctories For I have hidden above a thousand issues to be filled up with flesh whereof it hath not hitherto as I know of repented any In the next place I have considered a Childish presumption of Physitians because they seriously perswade themselves that nature will hearken to their own commands also that a defluxion and falling down of humors which they command being supposed is a most exceeding absurdity But let it be sufficient for
that they do in a Pleurisie decree not any remedy for a Phlegmatish Catareh as also they are forgetful of the Pleura already torn because they do provide for expectoratings only by sugared lickings or Ecligmaes Indeed they sufficiently see that the Pleurisie is a sudden Disease for which the saltness of the Phlegm could not far of have produced a corroding in the place or have made a hollowness which the blood falling down thither doth fill up and further extend Therefore they will have that defluxing Phlegm only by its weight to rent the Pleura from the Ribs As if it should not flow down by drops and the weight of Phlegm that flows down from above now falling down perpendicularly on the place should make the force of some pounds at once But they have not yet declared the hollowness in which that height of heaped-up Phlegm should reside For although the sick should be as empty in his brain as is the present foolish assertion of the Schools yet so great Phlegm in the Scull could not tear the Pleura from the Ribs 2. They have not yet taught the wayes whereby the continuance of the Rheum in its passage from the brain should be unto the membrane between the Ribs and much less which by its weight aloof of should perform that 3. Neither also have they as yet denominated that renter and so mighty tearer which may pluck away the Pleura grown to the Ribs on every side by a stiff and much fiber or which may stretch water into a dropsical belly like the tympany Neither lastly do they shew why that Catarrh doth rain down unto an appointed and small place which was made or detained in the brain in common For doth not the subsequent subscribing to each other from so many and so great rashnesses of the Schools deserve to be of suspected credit For it is a work of greater violence than that of Phlegm falling down to have pul'd away the Pleura from the Ribs For as many as have commented on the ninth Chapter of Almanzor longly and largly concerning the vein Azugos or stock arising from the right side of the trunk of the upper part of the hollow vein whether it be distributed between the Ribs without a peer or fellow do scratch themselves and so forget their defluxing rheum even as also the weight of the same being turned only unto the emptying of venal blood For herein they rather consider the one only remedy which they have and that alike known to Country People to wit by the only repeated cutting of a vein than the very nature of the Disease or the Schools their supposed causes of a Rheum And moreover all have altogether declined from that absurdity because the consideration of a Rheum being rejected in time of curing they think to have brought the cause from that part first from which the blood slid as it were by accident out of the unlike vein between the Pleura For they have alwayes so greatly fallen under sluggishness that they for the most part overshadow the causes by meditating on the effects Neither have they ever heeded that the blood is not brought down by the veins of their own accord as neither that it slides into the place by its own proper fall For to tear the Pleura from the Ribs to send venal blood thither and the like are the offices of life but not the faults of a sliding liquor But what will the Schools do which are accustomed to subscribe so much to Pagans whose doctrine is wont to imitate not nature but science Mathematical it self in artificial things For they see the vein Azugos to be extended and derived thorow both Ribs therefore from hence also they beg all the cause No otherwise than as a Traveller sleeping about a river and a dead carcass is found slain in the next wood by Thievs therefore that sleeping man loosing his head as guilty ought to shed all the blood Therefore they appoint blood-letting and try to draw forthblood by revulsion out of the vein Azugos made guilty as the most neer immediate and containing cause But where now remains your Catarrh of Phlegm or Choler flowing down from the head and the which only by its weight doth tear the Pleura from the Ribs They at least intend to pull back blood from the unlike or non-peered vein not only flowing but also in possibility to flow And it is for that cause called revulsion even as also some more near vein being pierced as it were the mediatress of the evil is called derivation Alas how circumspect are the Schools in discursive and artificial things Which in nature are nothing but mockeries Because although a vein of the elbow may empty out all its blood even into the hollow vein and this consequently may draw the blood out of the vein Azugos yet the Schools ought to know that presently after the whole venal blood is equally restored again into the veins So that although the vein of the elbow might be wholly evacuated which is never yet that the whole blood should be presently again equalized throughout the whole co-weaving of the veins whence it is manifest that the trifles of revulsion and derivation are vain because they are such things which being granted yet would be serviceable to the intention but for a small time of delay I pray therefore let Physitians consider that blood-letting is not of use in the Pleurisie for revulsion and derivation but for a meer exhausting of the blood and strength and the lessening thereof To wit that nature being sore afraid of that evacuation may desist and cease from sending an increase of venal blood about the Pleura Let them well mark I say whether this be not with so notable and sudden a loss of strength in a disease wherein the faculties themselves alone do bear the whole burthen to cure from the latter or effect by a forecaution and prevention of its increase Is that I say to go unto the co-knit and nourishing cause while as they do not convert their whole endeavour unto the thing doing or causing but unto the thing to be done They are altogether foolish services which are drawn from artificial things For a Brook flowing to a certain bound is diminished and stayed if its bank be opened at the side and it slide with a more near and ready journey to a steep place But what shall that profit if the blood can be only emptyed unto some ounces alone and indeed with a notable loss of strength Shall not the blood when the vein is stopped up flow again unto the place appointed as long as the beginning of motion doth remain Shall it not be more convenient to have stayed the beginning of the Flux Seeing that from a vein being cut no other good can be expected in the Plenrisie than that which may be hoped for by the weakning of the strength To wit because nature being greedy of strength needy and wanting of venal blood
and pory skin resist the water which was able to pierce the scull But when as it should be collected under the hairs then it should either there swell into a descending flood or indeed should flow down with a slender thred of small drops If it being little should be dis-cussed in manner of sweat or if it should make a collection in the temples of the Head it should presently bewray it self to the finger What if it flow down from thence at least wise it could not but in the term or bound to which of motion stir up a tumour of sweet distilled water But at least wise that water could never fall down into the muscles or be the sooner collected among the muscles because they are they which are every one cloathed with their own membrane And moreover neither is there room nor passage for flowing down between the skin and the Periostion of the scull unto the Muscles between the ribs that the distilled water may cause a Pleurisie For that which was without pain under the skin and hairs should presently with so great a fury of pains stir up a Pleurisie and only with its descending by its naked weight rent the Pleura from the ribs it being implanted in and joyned unto them by fibers Certainly a huge cruelty should happen by defluxing At length neither can a Rheume fall down unto the teeth and the sinews or nerves thereof Because the sinews which on both sides enter from the bottom of the brain unto the cheek or jaw do without and within so fitly or exactly fill up the hole that they make a sheath so just and so equal that there is not room for the entring water to run down and so much the less because the water doth not undergo a small hole shut beneath And much less shall it flow down to one only wonted and only rotten tooth which it may afflict And furthermore a Catarrhe being gathered together under the hairs should run down into the cheeks but shall not fall down under the gums thorow the fleshes of these and without being thorowly mixt with venal blood according to the guidance of the sinews under the flesh nigh the jaw bone perhaps unto some one tooth And which more is if the water should rush downwards from above and it be granted for a cause of pain of the upper jaw Yet in no wise nor ever water not alive could molest the lower jaw What if a Rheume can decline unto the eyes or ears surely its troublesome matter should first proceed from the plain and feigned basis of the brain into its bosom it had first called a counsel yea had sooner brought forth death than an ophthalmy or inflamation of the eye Moreover I remember that a Pleurisie is not between the skin or the external fleshy membrane and the Muscles between the ribs whither notwithstanding it should flow down from the skin of the scull rather with a straight line and not inwards but either in the very oblique Muscles between the ribs or between these and the Pleura compassing the ribs whence it hath found its name Which way therefore shall a Catarrhe fall down hither from the Head I grant indeed by way of supposition that snivel doth fall down through the palate even in Children and healthy folks into the stomack Yet this doth not pertain unto a Catarrhe or Rheume Neither doth the snivel arise from that so much reported vapour of the stomack but it is an unprofitable excrement begotten by the wandring keeper As in its own place I further grant that in the joynt sickness and elsewhere a salt excrementitious liquour is oft-times sustained but the humour latex alone is the Vulcan Morter or Parget and fewel of these but not an ascent of vapours out of the stomack into the brain not many humours nor the feigned distillation of Phlegme conjoyned with choler For the very Schools themselves being smitten with shame that the Head being on every side filled with the brain should be the Colledge of Catarrhs and that from thence almost all Diseases should rain down have accused the stomack Alas smoaking with and supplying matter for continual vapours But when as they found the stomack in healthy persons to be guiltless but for the joynt sickness do suddenly accuse defluxions in healthy persons through the shadow of an over-spread bashfulness they whisper neither dare they to speak cleerly as from knowledge for they borrow sharp choler and salt phlegme from the venal blood and leave the controversie before the Judge whether those humours are to be fetched from the Liver and are separated in the veins from the blood that they may be expelled unto the joynts or indeed water or a certain snivel or a certain un-named thing be brought down thither out of the Head between the skin For they are as yet uncertain and so much the more confused because they are ignorant who that separater or who that deriver of humours should be which alone might bring these sincere humours not defiled by the venal blood unto the joynts and should make choice sometimes of this and sometimes of that part but should forsake the more weak and more sluggish part and should daily enslave a new one unto himself yea and invade the knotty part and that which is subject to stoppage Whatsoever therefore the Schools do prattle concerning vapours lifted up out of the stomack for the matter of a Rheume let it be old Wives Fables For the stomack is never more cold than is meet it is the more diminished indeed in its digestive ferment whereunto the coctive faculty ought to be attributed but not to heat as I have elsewhere taught at full The Liver also doth never from its own proper temperature offend in heat seeing there is no heat in us but what is by reason of life and therefore every dead Carcass when the life is extinguished is suddenly cold But the troublesome heat of the Liver is alwayes by accident For example Let a cold thorn be fastened in the finger an example moreover elsewhere minded concerning Fevers there is presently a pulse and heat and swelling from the pain For this is not because the thorn is hot nor because the neighbour blood was hot before the thorn but the heat by reason of the thorn cometh by accident So think thou of the Liver for if it be hot it hath its own thorn which doth not shew a cooling of it but a taking of it away For cooling refreshment makes not only a cloakative Cure but draws the evil it self into desperation And that thing the Schools may seriously take notice of and the vain device of the heat of the Liver and the manifold errors of curing sprung from thence Likewise let them seriously note that the Medicines Alas those appointed or applyed to the Head Stomack and Liver for Catarrhs have been vain and void A Catarrhe or Rheume therefore hath not matter place passage custom admission of piercing into the
the brain being well constituted but the powers of the same being diverted and ill affected the snivel is watery sharp salt harsh yellow tough c. and runs down by a way which is the more fit for it out of the basin or it appeareth in its brain-funnel For that which in the beginning of a Pose drops down in the form of water is not meer snivel but a salt latex whereby nature endeavours to wash off that which sits on the spungy bone which is next the brain as a forreign enemy even as I have said And then that which flows down yellow and slimy at the declining of the Pose is not the same which the latex at first was nor is it there so long detained and thickned as nevertheless the Schools do teach when as otherwise the whole scull although it were empty of brain should scarce be sufficient for a Case for so great a quantity of excrement For such new snivel is created every moment being far different from a healthy one in colour stink slyminess and sharpness Moreover it is a ridiculous thing that this stinking snivel should be said to be now cocted and thickned by the former latex the which doth again grow by a strange vice But that it is the latex in the beginning of a Pose is manifest for presently after two dayes the belly is dryer and the urine more sparing In the next place that latex being by a luke-warmth evaporated hath scarce any thing whence it may wax snivelly as much snivel soever as the latex bringeth down with it so much muscilage or slyminess it hath and no more However it is and whatsoever that is which flows downwards from the brain unto the jaws not so much as one only drop thereof enters unto the Lungs but first it should at every drop stir up a peril of choaking For truly if one only drop of water by an unwary swallowing falling down into the winde-pipe doth incur a fear of choaking unto him that drinketh what should not so great a plenty of snivel do which doth now and then in a small space fill basins For it is far out of the way that a few hours sleep doth bring down whole basins of snivel into the Lungs without feeling and that they do enter them without the fear of choaking For I being long since in the time of my young beginning deluded by the Schools have placed these kind of sick folks in such a manner that they might sleep between pillows on their face hoping that the mucky snivel would slide down thorow the nostrils which else should slide into the Lungs and thus far I hoped for a freedom from the effect of the Catarrhe But the following morning derided through spittings out by reaching my ignorance For then I diligently searched into the Orthopnea which placeth such as breath with a straight neck that it did a little stop the doctrine of a Catarrhe and convince it as frivolous Seeing they should be strangled by a laying with their face upward and Astronomer like whereby notwithstanding the fore-going matter of a Catarrhe should be cut off Wherefore I began to take good notice that every member which is badly affected doth frame not only very much of its own excrement but also of an adverse or contrary one For so the eye being diversly affected very much liquid corruption and of a sharp tear doth issue forth the jaws also being stopt up by a squinancy a slymie thread doth continually hang down on the fore-part of the tongue Hence therefore I have believed that the Lungs were held by the Law of other members so that as oft as it was provoked hurt pricked slain oppressed or affected through the injury of the Air or by an Endemical Gas it did bring forth through an error proper to it divers testimonies of its weariness or grief not that therefore those so guilty excrements do unsensibly slide from the brain for the most part sound between the slender conduits of the rough Artery Then at length I began to wonder that the Schools in the Pose did see indeed a proper member to degenerate and to imitate the excrement of the Head and in the mean time that they have not supposed the same thing could happen alike to the Lungs as to the rest of the members So whatsoever is brought forth of the Lungs that is wholly to be attributed to the brain and that that falls down a ridiculous thing into the rough Artery without feeling and is by degrees decocted in the banishment of its race for the most part there to be detained without difficulty of breathing even until a ripeness When as now and then more is cast forth by cough in one moneth than the whole capacity of the breast is large Therefore the yellow and ashie spittings of persons in a Consumption are the errors of the vegetative or flourishing faculty in the Lungs and the venal blood there degenerated the which therefore a wasting leanness of the whole body follows Wherefore vain and deplorable Remedies Cephalical or for the Head are administred vain are the drinks of cooling Barley-broath or Cream Lohochs Syrupes and whatsoever by swallowing descends into the stomack Because it is that which is oftentimes formally changed in its journey before it come unto the part affected For what is more foolish than to give Indian roots to drink for the drying up of Rheumes for what shall China Sarsaparilla Guaiacum dry up being drunk in the form of water for what shall they dry up which thing dryed up should not be more hurtful or pernicious than the liquid thing it self why do they call for drying up those things which that they might not be made have need only of a restraining Remedy and the which when they are made do require not to be dryed up but to be cast forth why have the Schools every where regard unto the effects and not unto the roots what if those forreign and barbarous Remedies do provoke sweat and diminish the latex with the dammage of the sick do they therefore come unto the root for truly by a sparing nourishment and plenteous sweat they do primarily lessen the venal blood and secondarily cause a leanness together with weakness Which thing the Schools have falsly brought over into the drying up of superfluous humours thinking to comprehend a competent quantity of venal blood and the degenerating of a diseasie excrement and the expulsion thereof in one and the same name of drying up For shall therefore the indisposition and changing Vulcan which of good venal blood brings forth consumptional spittings in the Lungs be overcome sleep diminished wax mild and desist which Vulcan in the mean time under an extream leanness of the Consumption doth never slacken from his fury Good God turn thou away the slaughter which the School and root of Pagans gaping after a little advantage doth commit The diseasie erroneous impression only is to be taken away which I call the inward
dream I saw my self in a certain Kingly Pallace excelling humane artifices But there was a high Throne encompassed with an unaccessable light of Spirits But he who sate in the Seat of the Throne is called He is And the foot-stool of his feet Nature The Porter of the Court was called Understanding who without speech reached unto me a little Book a choice out of darkness the name whereof was The bud of a Rose not yet opened And although the Porter uttered no voice yet I knew that little Book was to be devoured by me I stretched forth my hand and ate it up And it was of an harsh and earthy taste as if it would stop up my winde-pipe so as I swallowed it with a great slowness of labour From whence afterwards my whole head seemed to be transparent Then afterwards another spirit of a superiour order gave me a bottle wherein was Fire-water as being in one word A name altogether simple singular undeclinable unseparable unchangeable and immortal But I knew not what my business was with it Neither heard I any thing more of it and by reason of the fear of its greatness my jawes were shut up and my voice clave to my jawes At length having performed due worship before the Throne I endeavoured diversly to experience what the bottle might contain Behold before the doors of the Court there was the Art of the Fire a cheerful old Woman being the Turn-key who did not open the locks without unless the Porter had first withdrawn the bolt within the which he did not attempt unless from a sign given him by the light of the Throne But unto those that knocked at the doors the Porter answered the Key-keeper holding her peace I know you not But they who tryed to look in thorow the lattices of the windows being smitten with darkness forthwith fell down mad many wandred up and down promising great things without a foundation I stood a good while silent and then afterwards a hand the rest of whose Body I saw not led me aside unto a pleasant Garden where on a sudden all Simples worshipped me as though every one had been singular by themselves In which assault I felt or perceived all the Simples of the world not indeed as if their qualities did act in me for I being but one had not been sufficient for the bearing of them all as it were their object but they all were seen as on a Theatre to represent in me their Tragedies And I wish I may well declare them with my pen I perceived in the first place that all heats colds moistures and dryths were as it were momentary qualities happening on things constituted like colours But those things which do heat cool moisten or dry us up I perceived that that did not happen indeed by reason of an excess of those qualities whose names they did obtain but in respect of an appropriation of the object For in this respect the dead carcass of a man who dyed of a languishing death although being nigh the fire it violently waxed luke-warm yet unto our touching it seemeth to be most cold so that the hand can scarce recover its heat a long while after it And surely that comes not to pass through a quality generated in us which is named cold the which indeed in contemplating of it doth so many points exceed our heat that it imprints an excess of so great cold but rather because the vital spirit being greatly afraid of the dead carcass doth depart or retire from the hand For in like manner Camphor resembling the savour of Pepper and bitter Opium are said to cool as they subdue or chase the Archeus After which manner also a Feverish Blas being the same in number doth stir up first cold and afterwards heat in the Archeus I perceived therefore that hot things from the moment of their first degree even unto the degree of an Eschar do not brand our temperature with an excess of heat To wit by producing in us an excelling of their heat but by the ministry of sharp salts they do so inflame our Archeus that they do more and more exasperate the same and at length do by burning assume a fiery violence through the motion of their own Blas Such as is the Prune and Persian fire And therefore none of those hot things do heat dead carcasses In the next place I perceived that nothing doth properly moisten us but by appropriation and therefore that neither doth water properly moisten us through a defect of appropriation which is the cause of approximating or the nearest approaching and assimilating But those things which do besmear stuffe up resolve and make the substance of our body as it were by small points salt without the sense of burning heat and sharpness those things I say do moisten And that only occasionally and as it were by accident Therefore I have perceived that whatsoever things do dissolve resolve and co-melt glutinous things do moisten To wit as they do withdraw the impediments of coagulation and drying And therefore the Mallow Marsh-mallow and those things which are believed to be moistening and so do stop transpiration have produced an error in the Schools For truly such a moistening was nothing but a diseasie detaining of excrements but not a dewie moistening of the parts I perceived also that no other things do dry up in us but those which by extenuating do dispose to exhalation For so sweat although it moisten the skin and make the habit of the Body swollen yet it meerly dryes us Furthermore whatsoever things do coagulate I perceived rather to harden and make clotty than to dry up and therefore resolving is opposite unto coagulating but not moistening But those things which do induce an Atrophia or Consumption for lack of nourishment and do make lean I perceived that was not done by a drying quality but because the Liquor otherwise nourishable is theevishly withdrawn elsewhere by occasion whereof the Ferments connexed to heat do perfect a true drying I perceived therefore that there was no other drying in us than that which was made by the resolving of the Ferments and the diflation or pussing away of heat I perceived I say that Coagulation it self or hardening did proceed from its own curd or property of a seed promoting the Liquors into a more solid Fruit. I perceived also that dry things which drink up liquors into them although they are actually dry yet that they are quickly satiated or filled with moistures do cease from combibing neither that they do at length enter into the root of the mixture of dry things And therefore I perceived that thirst is not an introduced quality of driness but that natural thirst is a sense of the Latex being diminished but not so plainly failing that it may even accuse of a principiating driness So I perceive that a thirst besides nature was not a token of drying for such do drink and extend the bottome of their belly their
past dissolved Gold yet I less profited by its potable juyce than by the decoction of any Simple But afterwards I could dissolve Gold and mock it with the face of Butter Rosin and Vitriol But I no where found the virtues attributed to Gold because it was also so reluctant to our ferments I perceived therefore that Gold without its own proper corrosive is dead dead I say unless it be radically pierced by its own corrosive Not indeed that it doth then resemble the Nature of the Sun and doth add any thing unto its vital faculties but onely that its whole body doth by purging unsensibly cleanse in a unisone tone or harmony Yea also the pretious Pearles called Vnions are by that corrosive changed into a Spermatical Milk which is sociable with the first constitutives of us and in this respect are they a Remedy of the Consumption Palsie c. At length I perceived That the liquor Alkahest did cleanse Nature by the virtue of its own Fire For as the Fire destroyeth all Insects so the Alkahest consumeth Diseases In the next place I perceived That Mercurius vitae reckoned by Paracelsus among his four secrets besides the fiery force of the fire of Hell doth clarifie the Organs no otherwise than as Stibium doth purify Gold from things admixt with it which same thing I judge concerning the tincture of Lile a Sunonymal Nature in the mean time desireth as it were by a new spring to rise again under these Medicines Yet we are without hope of restoring into our former state seeing an infusion of new faculties arguing immortality is wanting unto us For it is appointed for every living Creature once to die Because there is nothing in Nature which can have an equal prevalency with the Temple of the Image of God Therefore I perceived That all renewing Medicines do operate by refining and in this respect by exhilarating otherwise there is not a true renewing of Youth And then I perceived That Secrets which do cure by resolving and expelling do nothing but awaken the faculties placed in us the which impediments being removed do as it were bud again under a new spring Lastly I perceived That there were Simples wherein a proper issuing of the forme doth not operate but the command of a strang form and character doth happen unto them that they might cause a contagion between Symbolizing or co-resembling things and from thence are Sorceries and Inchantments For whatsoever things are prepared by a voluntary Blas are for the most part propagated to the functions of local motion they are directed I say unto the Sinewes being most apt for the stirring up of pains and sicknesses or griefs For neither have they poysons or ferments unless an evil spirit do add them or couple them by functions vanquished by himself for then they do excell other poysons being a-kin to the poyson of the Plague Yea I perceived That even all poysons besides corrosives did act by reason of a specifical property emulous of or imitating the imaginative faculty placed in the seed formally inbred and having the powers of a ferment equivocally acting I perceived moreover That every thing doth variously diffuse its activities according to the manner of the thing receiving and of application For bread operates otherwise within in us and otherwise in all bruit beasts and otherwise in the Stomack Liver and in the other Kitchins by reason of the diversities of ferments So I perceived that flesh applied to the outward parts doth presently putrifie which within is resolved by the ferments and at length assimulated unto our parts To wit I have perceived Polenta or Barley floure dried by the fire and fried after soaking in water to besmear and soften the outward parts which within nourisheth heateth bindes the belly and moves flatus's For every Simple being outwardly applyed doth under the sixth digestion display its virtues with us the which within is almost in its first progresses for the most part subdued A live man being long detained in the water would putrifie but dead flesh being alwayes well rinced in a new stream doth put on the nature of Balsame So the Stomack although it be perpetually moist yet it doth not thereby putrifie For the operations of Nature Galen was ignorant of because he smelt not out the properties of ferments But Paracelsus hath caused the incongruities of an Idiotisme in affirming that Oyles and Emplaisters are digested and transchanged into new flesh in a Wound even as meats are in the Stomack But he is ignorant that there is no passage into the sixth digestion but gradually by precedent digestions For this cause there is no venal blood made in the Stomack as neither is any nourishment made by a Clyster detained in the Colon or confines of the Ileon however the Schooles may whisper to the contrary For Brothes do presently putrifie in the Bowels neither is there a making of Cream but far be it that blood should be made if it shall not be first a Cream neither is the Liver the shop of the Cream much less is there an incarnating in the Stomack But least of all that of an Emplaister flesh or blood should be made For the skin being opened putrifaction is presently introduced into it no otherwise than as the shell or peel of an Egg being bruised there is corruption For hence is there a weeping Liquor Sanies Pus Sandy-water Latex Wormes c. for preventing whereof the whole care of the Chyrurgion diligently endeavoureth and the which being separated the flesh doth voluntarily grow but not by applyed Remedies I have also perceived that Salts which are domestical unto us are fitter for seasoning of meats also for dissolving and exterging or clean wiping away of filths than that they are promoted into nourishment But that Oyles are scarce proper for sanguification but least of all those which ascend by the fire But that distilled waters have small conditions of medicine Because Nature doth every where rejoyce in nourishment caused of Bodies existing in their composition And therefore artificial Salts do pierce deeper than Oyles the which do resist sanguification neither are they thoroughly mixed And therefore the Salts of Spices or sweet smelling things which are made of their Oyles do supply the room of their first Being Magisteries are to be had in great esteem because the substance of these is entire digestible and obedient to the ferments And therefore Nature refuseth meats which are hidden in their Essences by reason of their difficulties of fermentation For all things that are too much graduated do draw after them the middle Life of the Blood but they are not easily subdued by the ferments In brief Those things which do the more stubbornly keep their middle Life are not easily vanquished by our Archeus neither are they onely stubborn in digesting but they are obstinate in perseverance and do act on us so far as they are not subdued But Verdigrease Crocusaeris Cerusse Precipiate Sublimate c.
consist in the withdrawing of the water and first matter or removall of that aforesaid Muscilage But what other thing is this than to cure from the effect I grant willingly indeed that as oft as the Latex doth not sufficiently serve the turn the Archeus of the Reins that he may satisfie his own furie doth sooner cause the blood to melt than he desisteth from his errour begun But where there is a plentiful Latex the dissoluting of the Flesh and Blood into a Latex is not worth his labour For in very deed as speedily as he can he drives all the Latex unto the places of the Dropsie neither is he idle but rageth as if in the driving of the Latex unto the Abdomen his own profitable end were to be expected For neither would it detain the Urine if it were the endeavour of the Archeus to dissolve the flesh and blood Those in whom both Kidneys are stopped by the Stone and do die being at length choaked by the Urine are not nevertheless therefore Dropsical because the Urine remaineth in the veins whereof to wit the Kidney intends to unload it self but cannot But in the Dropsie it is able but doth not intend to unload in it self In a Dropsie therefore there is a poysonus fury of the Archeus not likewise in an obstruction by the Stone And therefore one Kidney being disturbed through a poysonous occasionall cause together and at once all the other Kidneys also alike rageth which thing in a stoppage by the Stone doth not in like manner happen But the Essence of a Dropsie doth require that not only the Kidney do neglect the separation of the Latex and shut the bolt of the Urine But moreover it must needs be that together also it dismisseth the Latex unto the places of the Abdomen yea and that it doth strictly close the pores of the Membranes least indeed any thing of the Latex or Winds do transpire and break out Truly the Archeus of the Reins doth rage with a great and foolish carefulness that he may make a Dropsie and his fury is nourished with a foolish stubbornness because when he feels the powers of nature to be dejected yet he nevertheless not any thing slackeneth from his concieved furie If therefore a stoppage by the Stone doth induce a Disease and death not a Dropsie if a Dropsie also brings a Disease and Death without a total yea or a material obstruction of the Kidneys it becomes manifest that the diversity of the same Diseases doth depend only on the immoderate desire and intentional fury of the Archeus being stirred up by a bloody poyson not likewise from a material errour of the Latex It is a Maxim that every being desires to be and remain Which indeed is to be understood of a Being governed by God by common and ordered or regular nature But not of a foolish Being and that which is outragious through a poyson such as is the Archeus from his corruption by sin and being provoked by the poysonous occasional cause of a Disease For it is even all one as a furious Man Horse or Oxe which casts himself headlong from a high place and procureth his own end For so the Archeus in his furies doth as it were by a stubborn endeavour procure destruction to himself The which indeed in many Diseases is perpetual wherein therefore it is lawful to accuse the madness and furies of the Archeus also that furious and mad images or likenesses are formed whereby he doth seminally communicate his own furies to a potent ferment Whence also it is wont to be said that a man is immediately more powerfully hurt of none than of himself Furthermore with what great carelesness and with how light a foot the Schooles of the Humorists have skipped over the consideration of Diseases may be seen not only from the cold distemperature of the Liver the which only and alone they suppose to be in the present Disease and so as if that being laid down for a Position they had given a full satisfaction and had declared a profound Oracle they repose themselves in quiet Yet without consideration that such a cold distemper cannot be restored but that Dropsical Persons do every where admit of cure But chiefly the negligence of the Heathenish Schooles doth clearly appear Because that among so many thousands Writers the first is as yet wanting who hath dared to think which way or by what possible means the Liver should lay up its water between the Abdomen and its Muscles none I say hath hitherto known that the Latex differs from the Urine And seeing that sometimes the Dropsie is for many months leading the Languishing weak unto their Coffin the Urine should of necessity stink if it should but for a very small time associate the liquid dung or drosse the which concerning the Disease of the Stone touching Fevers and elsewhere I have in words plentifully explained unto it self as a companion Which dross notwithstanding is required unto the integrity of Urine But if a Dropsical Person shall assume any of that dross from a Bowel into the meseraick veins that drosse likewise remaines with the small quantity of Urine neither being co-mixed with the Latex is it sent unto the Abdomen All Writers therefore have hitherto so feared this Gordian knot that indeed they have not mentioned so much as a word of it Let us therefore consider that which others before me have neglected For truly all juice or chyle of the Stomach sliding down through the Bowels is naturally regularly and alwayes attracted and sucked by the Meseraick veins to wit the Mouths or extreamities whereof do end into the Intestine or Bowel it hath also remained scanty hitherto after what manner so plentifully a Chyle doth dayly passe through the intestine into the mouths of the veins of the Mesentery without any hole And likewise why winds being pressed by the intestine do not proceed through the same pores into the veins of the Mesentery seeing they are by so much the thinner and subtiller than the Chyle by how much their Body is lighter which hath no weight with the ponderous Chyle But these things shall by degrees manifest themselves under explication the which because they being reckoned as it were the impossible or at least-wise the unsearchable miracles of nature have suspended every quill of Writers and the Schooles through the excuse of hidden Causes have been content to have suspended all things But go to as to my search in hand Every liquor is sucked by the intestines for that thing I willingly grant without controversy and is snatched into the veins of the Mesentery to wit as well that which is appointed for Blood as that which is after any sort at sometime deputed for excrements But afterwards there is not any passage of the veins of the Mesentery but unto the port vein which insinuates it self into the Liver Therefore the matter whereof a Dropsie is carried into the Liver no otherwise than as
destruction of the whole Bodo and his own I will therefore open the matter so far as my Industry hath permitted me to conceive For in Nature there is twofold Action to wit One whereby a Body is enclosed in a Body as Wine in a Bottle and the Water of the Dropsie between the Peritoneum and Abdomen Yea the pores of these Membranes are Diseasly closed For the Body is per-spirable in health and the sweat doth wholly diminish the Latex so that the watery drink in Summer doth presently by sweat flow through the skin But sweat is for the most part unprofitable in the Dropsie so that although the Belly sweats yet it doth not diminish the Dropsie however many have vainly tryed many things about these trifles There is also another Action which is regular and of a different kind in Nature Whereby I have elsewhere shewed by many Examples in us a certain solid Body to wit a knife beard of corn needle arrow or dart head bones shells of fishes and the like are transmitted thorow the Stomack Paunch Veins without the hurting or wounding of these And so that there is a wonted and necessary penetration of Bodies in Nature For the first of those Actions as it is every where known is made so far as a Body doth altogether obey its own bolts of superficies hardness weight channels c. And one Body in respect of the other is as it were dead But the other Action is wholly vital and of the Spirit of Life which is not cloathed with the Garment of a thicker Body But it s own self is the veriest Garment of that Body And the which it doth therefore derive through another vital body subjected unto it For so Chyrurgions have noted Apostems or Ulcers to be made through the very bones themselves And so Authors who are worthy of credit whom in the Chapter of injected things I have alleadged do admit of a penetrating of corporeal dimensions as oft as a knife passeth through the Stomach and with a corrupt mattery Aposteme is returned through the Ribs without a wound of the Stomach In the Dropsie therefore the aforesaid double action is conversant about the same Latex For this Latex as long as it being cloathed with a clear vital spirit doth after some sort enjoy a venal life is led through the solid places it slighteth passages seeing there is none unpassable by it But it deriveth it self unto the Prison of the Dropsie and there as well through a constriction of the Pores of the Membranes as singularly and especially by reason of a deserting of the same cloathing spirit it lays up it self as it were an excrement now dead And the which neither doth therefore find deliverance from thence unless the vital spirit doth again cloath and encompass it This is indeed that spiritual force which is more powerful than any Bellows The which we bear in our inward parts the power whereof we dayly admire have never known and being compelled by demonstrations to admit of do scarce beleive In the Dropsie therefore I have found a fury of the Reins and their erring powers which furie shutteth and is scarce that which may open and the which doth open and lay up neither is it that which maketh to re-gorge Seeing therefore those actions of fury conspiring toward their own destruction are plainly spiritual for as a Physitian I every where contemplate of the spirit as a vital air raised out of the arterial Blood but I touch not at the immortal mind neither do such spirits act unless they are constrained by likenesses or Images framed by them Therefore indeed I call it the furies of the Archeus while the Kidney ceaseth and is almost forgetful of its own Office and appointment in separating the Latex from the venal blood therefore it shuts it self and being as it were wroth and exorbitant it lays up the Latex elsewhere But that I may analogically or resemblingly conceive of and express this tenour of fury as I ought I first of all consider the out-chased venal blood to be detained in the Kidney or to lurk upon the hollow boughtiness of the intestine c. Wich blood when it hath put on a fermental malignity presently the Kidney the governour of the Latex being full of wroth receives the sleepie or stupifying poyson of that blood But the ordination of the Latex is to wash off filths if there are any detained in any place of the Body and seeing the Kidney cannot by the Latex wash off that out-hunted blood because the Latex cannot descend thither this co-heaped in the veins for disdains sake and the Kidney is thereby so affected with disdain and weariness or grief that it cannot performe the office enjoyned it And therefore it presently shuts the passage of the Urine that that which it cannot do by a regular plenty of the Latex it may perfect by an abundance thereof As if it considered Thou Latex goest not whither I would send thee to wash off the out-chased blood I will not let thee pass through thy accustomed Ureters Such therefore is the fury of the enraged Archeus of the Reins the which at length arising to a degree cloaths the Latex and derives it whither it will But besides not only the event in making doth confirm this fury of the Archeus but also in drying especially while a Dropsie is sometimes cured of its own free accord For truly that comes to pass as if the Archeus did repent him and were sorry for his deeds I knew the Countess of Falax who while being a young Maid did swell with a Dropsie by the perswasion of a certain Physitian for she was held desperate by all abstained almost for the space of a full year from drink being content with the more solid food and broaths And she became healthy and is now alive being seventy years of age In the first place thirst whether it be taken from a sense of moisture failing or for the defect it self of moisture At leastwise in neither manner doth it dry up a Dropsical water For although no drink be Drunk at leastwise broaths which do afford a sufficient quantity of venal blood do also yeild a small quantity of Urine and Latex so much as is sufficient for the subsistance of a Dropsie In the next place neither doth thirst nor the defect of drinks it self take away the occasional Cause of a Dropsie which for the most part is venal blood expelled but rather they do the more dry up and the more stubbornly reserve for it that it may resist a resolving through the abstinence of the counterfeited thirst But that continual thirst together with a hope and perswasion of health did pacifie the errour or indignation in the Archeus of the Reins from whence I have learned that thirst doth regularly arise from the Kidney but not from the Liver and much less from the lesser branches of the veins sucking the greater until a defect of moisture be brought unto the Orifice
the Essence as to other Bruite Beasts he had called that Serpent a Scholastical and speaking rational Animal The not unlike to which appeared to B. Anthony in the Wilderness For first there came to meet him a fourfooted Monster the which when it had begun to speak it spake imperfectly and avoided or ran away And afterwards another which in the Form of a Satyr did perfectly speak the Dialect of the Country For neither must we judge that Monster to have been the Devil because he is he who never requires Prayers to be made unto God for him and therefore by the Church it is called an Animal or sensitive living Creature from the same Authority whereby Paul the first of Hermites was Reckoned among the number of Saints but it is not called a Devil or Spirit and it is Decyphered by B. Jeroms by its tokens borrowed from B. Anthony Therefore Adam might speak to the Serpent no otherwise than as Anthony to the Satyr The present Text therefore of Genesis hath hitherto had no Arch-heretick since Origen and Athiests because it shews a true and literal History Last of all I will add some things as it were by way of impertinency For indeed I have said that Fishes do Generate indeed but not by way of Sexual Copulation although they have Genital Instruments First of all I think that there is an Univocal or single Generation of Fishes bringing forth Eggs Therefore I shall say enough by the example of one Fish For neither were it meet for me narrowly to search into Fishes which are under the Waters by their species or particular kinds There is a certain Fish in stony Waters a devourer of Flesh and easily the most swift of Fishes called by our Country-men a Trout For nigh a little River or Brook where Tyber Perpendicularly falls from a high Rock he is seen to ascend the whole height of the Rock in a straight line five hundred foot at least therefore he swimmeth threefold swifter against the Gulf than the steep Water doth fall downwards First of all here the Opinion of the Schools is false to wit That the Water doth alwayes fall down in a Circular Figure For there is seen a certain small drop of Water with a Spire or Point behind and the Spire is the more sharp backwards by how much the higher it falls And that thing the resistance of the Air convinceth of For although they will have the Water to Imitate a Circle because the Sphere is the most Capacious of Figures for the same Reason of its greatness it most difficulty cleaveth the Air the which therefore hinders the speed of its fall Furthermore the Female Trout her Eggs growing big within her feels the Membrane of her Secundine to be broken and to cleave asunder by Degrees wherein the Eggs are entertained as in a purse and presently she voids her Eggs and layes them up in the Sandy bottom yea the very Imagination of the Trout destroyes her Eggs For if the Water hath onely a Stony bottom as I have perceived in our Springs or Wells that are Cemented with Chalk the Eggs do not fructifie but if the bottom be strewed with Sand the Eggs do bring forth But the Male Trout besprinckles the Eggs being brought forth with his Seed and that Seed layes upon the Eggs without like a Spiders Web And at length the Eggs being thus fenced they passe over into little Fishes In this Species therefore there is not a Carnal Copulation and the Copulation should be void the which within indeed should not touch at so much as the thousandth part of the Eggs. In the next place neither is there an annexed Seed seen laying on the Eggs and therefore neither is the Seed of the Male of the Constitutive part of Fishes Although Eggs that are destitute of the covering of Seed do never become Vital For it is seen that Fishes have in this thing almost kept the shadowy Image designed for Humane Generation before the fall But as there is an innumerable Fertility of Fishes bringing forth Eggs so also a possession of long Life although the long Life be so easily attained yet it doth most toughly adhere And moreover many seem to grow for their whole Life time For by how much the farther they depart from the Copulation of the Flesh by so much the more fruitful they are and of a longer Life So in the Lake of Lemane a Trout doth oft-times ascend unto an hundred pound A Pike also by a sign hung on him is noted to have lived unto three hundred years and to have grown unto an amazing bigness and then neither as yet to have dyed but by a violent Death An Eele in the Rivers of Lire nigh the Village Rumst being sent to Bruxells unto the Emperour Charls the fifth is observed to have been 17 foot in length Worms in the Silk-worm by a Famous Example after a Death or sleep of two Months do Degenerate into Butter-flies They Figure out a shadow of the Resurrection for because they never go together or Copulate before they rise again changed neither hath the Female conceived besides an inspired Chaos while as the Male being plainly without blood and the whole Female is melted into her own Eggs. That Worm by its own will as by its own Funerall co-weavingly encloseth it self in the Bombast it represents the Image of the Death and Resurrection of the Faithful while as being a winged Bird it flies out from thence being before not instructed to flie neither doth it afterwards stand in need of food For we are taught by the abject Creeping things of how much esteem it is with God to have abstained from Copulation throughout our whole Youth and Man-hood Moreover also if thou shalt look more fully into the matter that very wrapping being the Masculine Seed doth adhere to the yolk without almost after the manner of Fishes notwithstanding a Chick is Materially formed out of the yolke alone however the Aristotelicks may grin to the contrary and that thing after 12. dayes from thence it hath listed me to behold and prove against Idiots by breaking the Egg daily Truly the Curde of a Cock adhering to the yolke doth by Degrees melt and is thorowly mixed with the putrifying white the Chick in the mean time forming it self of the yolke For from thence I have learned that the Curdy Seed of the Cock doth breath indeed a Spirit the stirrer up but not the former or framer of Life And that thing a Coney with the Tail of a Dormouse hath more plainly confirmed unto us At least-wise there is a fruitful multitude of Fishes and a prosperous Benediction thereof and a less necessity of things requisite for bringing forth a long continuance of Life and a constant and easie Endurance of Cold and Hunger Nimbleness also and swiftness of Motion lastly they bring forth without Pain which thing Beasts that do admit of a Copulation of the Male do not likewise do and so they unfold
not subject unto the respects of the Superiority or Inferiority of Places nor in the next place obeying the Laws of drawing Water For because they are lively they keep their vital Property no less than the Center it self unhurt Yet assoon as they run down from thence they presently die no otherwise than as out-hunted Blood or a Hand that is cut off for then they are at first constrained to obey the Laws of the more weighty Bodies the importunate Positions of Places and Scituations To wit that they may not cease thenceforth to rush through steep Places into the Sea requiring as it were the Inn of their Antient rest In the fourth place it is to be noted That even as this Soyle being exposed in the Air in the superficies of the Earth doth express its natural Properties no less than that which lays hid some hundred of Ells from thence beneath the Horizon of the Earth So also thou shalt remember that the same Sand doth ascend unto the greatest heigth of Mountains and now and then unto their very top through the Seams and broad intervening Passages of rockie Stones and from thence do thrust forth daylie Fountains not any thing diminished by summer Heats For in Man as long as the Blood doth flloat in the Veins there is a like respect of Scituations as well in the Forehead as in the Feet and it is ignorant as well of Above as Beneath But beeing chased out of the Veins it puts on the Condition of weighty Bodies So also in the Macrocosm or great World as long as the Water doth enjoy a common Life in the former Inn it hastens upwards and downwards without labour because it knows it not But being once shaken from its vital Inn it ceaseth not to hasten until in its Iliad or Night it recovereth its blessed Retirances or Receptacles of rest Therefore the Spirit nourisheth the Waters within also the swelling of the vast Sea as the mind being diffused through the Joynts doth stir the whole Lump But from hence the Sea hath not yet sufficiently been made known which watereth the Fountains and vomiteth out Rivers and whither the Scriptures saith the same do at length unweariedly hasten For that which the Scripture calleth the Sea is a Collection of all Waters into their Antient and continual Cup-board Of which Collection this beholdable and external navigable Sea is nothing but the Fruit disposed into its Sconce Wherefore the Receptacle congregating Root and Collection altogether of all Waters containeth that boyling Sand which verily being a thousand times more wealthy and bigger doth also therefore contain as much more Water by a thousand times as the Ocean Because it is that which fills up almost the whole Diameter of the Earth for whose outmost Lip only the External Sea doth fill up the depth of one or two Leagues at most For the Arch-type or first Framer separated the Waters from the Waters Not indeed the Sea from the Rivers or the Sea should not be the Collection of all Waters or both these from the Clouds but the true and Internal Sea from this External Navigable Sea he disjoyned on the first dayes This Internal I say Invisible hitherto an Abyss and great Sea are those waters whereby the Prophet Sang the The Foundations of the World were supported and the which although they have hitherto stood neglected are called in Genesis The Sea by the Creator of Things From thence indeed also Ecclesiastes hath likewise fetched Fountains and Rivers which were to return thither They run down therefore out of this Soyle and for fear of a Vacuum the External Sea doth again pierce the same Sand as it were by straining and presently almost in its first Paces sequesters or layes aside its Saltness But because Fountains and Rivers have by a leasurely Decursion or Race dispensed the seeds and matter of all Minerals which before they kept in their Bosom and the commerces whereof the Life of Man can scarce want therefore they swiftly hasten unto the External Sea whereby they may again require fruitful Entertainments at the internal Sea the Night of Orpheus the Darkness of Pluto according to Hippocrates the Oromasis of the Persians the Iliad of Paracelsus where Reasons and Gifts the Seeds of Minerals I say being not as yet joyned unto Bodies do lay for the Water which is again to be gotten with Child by the Seeds Therefore there is not an idle sliding down of Waters into the Ocean For they are governed by Intelligence and as if they were strong in understanding cease not to utter their Offices the Testimonies of an infinite goodness and providence Surely as many as shall behold the Cabalastical Science shall admire at this in the fore-front yet most true Because those that are ignorant of most things must needs admire at most things But the Ocean doth dayly hand forth some convenient thing to our sight by a double ebbing and flowing To wit the Navil or Boss of the Water ascending contrary to the Art of drawing Water and the Waves swelling according to the Conjunction of the Moon For the Sea liveth almost by a certain right of its own to wit the Wind being silent it stirring up voluntary Ragings curiously observing a proportionable Scituation of the Moon and being swollen with Waves it going to meet the same lastly with a various successive change of Seasons Light and Motions and a continued heap of Waters lifting up its overflowings on high sometimes here sometimes elsewhere at set Intervals Therefore whosoever thou art although thou seest dayly Wonders of Nature in the Ocean the vital and fountainous Disturbances of the more inward true and lively Sea and of the far more straight or narrow Abysse which are dedicated unto humane uses cease thou to wonder CHAP. XCV Another Paradox 1. No Fountaines are from Air thickened 2. Elements are not changed or perish 3. Whatsoever is generated is generated by a Seed and whatsoever is made in Nature is made from the necessity of a Seed 4. There are onely two primitive Elements and two secondary ones 5. A Paradoxal Explication 6. A proof by handicraft operation 7. The Heaven and the Earth shall perish not the Water and the Air. 8. The Art of Distilling unfolds Natural Phylosophy 9. What a Vapour is 10. A proof against Aristotle 11. A second Mechanical Proof 12. What and of what sort the Magnal or Sheath of the Air is 13. Why small drops do not fall down in a Vapour and Snows and when they do fall 14. A proof against Aristotle 15. A proof 16 17. A handicraft operation VVE have treated concerning the Spring concerning the immediate original and nativity of Fountaines more briefly than a Paradox and more tediously I confess than the Doctrine of those of the Spaw did require for it is a most difficult thing to have kept a mean in all things to wit as the Waters do proceed from a most rich Inn of Waters unto their appointments Although in
the mean time they do now and then assoon as may be reach the Air but sometimes they run head-long down by long journeys and Pipes of Earth and rockie Stones before they yeild themselves to the Light yet there was the same reason necessity and end of their Institution on both sides to wit the will of him who created all things for our uses But it remains to crave leave that Aristotelical spirits may indulge my liberty if I shall judge it a dream impossible to Nature that Fountaines should be bred from a co-thickning of Air For indeed that also is chiefly true That Air was never nor is it to be in any Age Water even as neither was Water to assume the Form of Air. For they are first-born Elements and the constant Wombs of things stable from the Creation of the World and so remaining unto the end thereof But whatsoever hath through the ranks of Generations subscribed it self unto successive change whether it may seem to be Earthly Stony or Liquory it derives all that from the mass of three Principles dedicated unto the Tragedy of Generation but not from the first Elements which rejoyce not but in a stable continuance and the which do again lay up their deserved Youngs into their antient â—â—ceptacles until the seeds are ripe for the Generation of a new Off-spring which Seeds the same Principles of Bodies being in the mean time thorowly changed by Digestions do again cloath and re-assume For from an invisible and incorporeal seed entertained in the Wombs of the Elements and putting on the Principles of Bodies all Generation in the Universe which is called voluntary is made Others have called that thing a Flux from a Non-being unto a Being which things that they may become more perspicuous it is to be noted that unto the production of every thing two onely Sexes if not one promiscuous one at least have concurred Therefore also by the same Law of a worldly harmony there are Originally two onely Elements in the Universe to wit the Air and the Water which are sufficiently insinuated from the sacred Text by the Spirit swimming upon the Abysse or great Deep of Waters in the first beginnings of the World The Earth therefore and the Fire or Heaven if they are Elements they are called secondary ones proceeding from the former For whatsoever of Earths rocky Stones Gemms Sands c. doth exist or flowes forth into a stinking Vapour or is at first changed into Ashes a Calx or Lime or at leastwise through the Society of some Addittament into a Salt the off-spring of Waters presently afterwards they all the volatile Summe exceeding or over comming the fixed Summe are made aiery and vapoury Efluxes rushing-into water with a hastened Violence And so that whatsoever is earthy hard solid and compacted seeing all that is reducible unto a more simple thin pure and former remaining substance pardon the Novelty most resplendent Prince it must needs be that it hath no Efficacy of an Element at all but that they are more latter things than Air and Water In like manner we say of the Heaven that the Heavens shall be changed shall wax Old and Perish and so that the Heaven and the Earth shall at length Perish the like message of which Destruction thou shalt not find concerning the Air and Water In the next place the Water or Air could never in any Age be reduced into any other former Body by Art or Nature This therefore is the Face this the Ordination this in the next place is the Office Combination Fate and End of the Elements to wit that the unchanged Essence of two most simple Bodies and their unmixed substance may afford a vital Womb or Prop unto Seeds and Fruits until at length the number of things to be generated being accomplished the heap of Principles together with the Seeds do constitute strange Families and Colonies their Bride-bed being separated in a more blessed Seat For the very many Dreams wherewith the World hath suffered it self to be hitherto circumvented the handicraft Operation of the Fire doth deride with loud Laughter Who indeed will deny but that the Water is easily changed into a Vapour But that Vapour or Exhaltation is so far from being Air that the Powder of Marble or a Flint may sooner be Water as we have shewn For a Vapour is in very deed materially and formally nothing else but a heap of the Atoms of Water lifted up on high The which our School shews forth more clearly than the Light at Noon The Air therefore whether it be received in hot or cold Glasses and pressed together therein shall never afford Water but according to how much of a Vapour that is of an extenuated Water it shall contain within it But the Water is seperated into very small conspicuous Drops against the Sun thorow the Glass at the Beginning of Distillation as long as the sides are cold to wit while through the vigour of Heat it flies away extenuated into a Vapour And that thing indeed happens no otherwise than by a proper Magnal which in things mixt and so also in the Water it self is the Skie thinner than the Air and dis-joynable from the same and sustaining its compression and enlargment contending for a middle thing or Nature between a Body and not a Body receiving the Impressions of the External Stars of its native Soyle being altogether intimate in all things by reason of which alone and not of Air we draw our Breath a proper Magnal I say and a spiritual Being in the Water doth indeed lift the Water on high it being lightned by Heat procuring a divulsion or renting asunder of the Magnal which same rent Magnal detains a quantity of Water proportioned unto it self which is rent upwards as well in the Glasses as in the Clouds and doth preserve them from falling until through the compression perhaps of succeeding Atoms as it comes to pass in distillation the former do grow together into drops and do enclose the former Magnal or vital Being within themselves Or the same Magnal of the Water being rarified through Heat and being straightway after condensed through help of External Cold doth constrain and restrain those same its own Atoms of small Drops within the Limits of its command I return unto thee Stagyrian Aristotle If Air be co-thickned into Water seeing thou teachest Air more to excell in Moisture than Water I pray thee why shall Cold which is natural to the Air change the Nature of the Air into a matter which is too moist of its own Nature In the next place now Cold and no longer Heat shall possess the vital Principle of Generation Wherefore although a Vapour be Air generated of Water formally transchanged and of the same again alike water doth grow together Now thou differest from thy own self who admittest of so frequent and easie a return from a privation unto a habit At length take thou also this handicraft Experiment Air may
Ingredients of the Fountains of the Spaw What the Vitriol of Mars may be 4. Coagulation is never made without Dissolution nor this without that 5. Bodies do not act into each other 6. Between an Action there is the Odour of a dissolving Spirit 7. The dissolving Spirit is Coagulated 8. Why a vein of Iron is Invisible in the Waters 9. Why Waters do smell of Sulphur 10. Why Sharpnesse perisheth in the Waters and when 11. That which is manifest becomes hidden and that which is hidden is made manifest 12. Why not the Iron but the Vein may be said to be in Being 13. The Salt of Fountains doth not grow in the vein of Iron 14. Why one Fountain is stronger than another 15. The difference of Things contained in Fountains 16. Why the Fountain Savenirius is not translated elsewhere 17. Why the Water of Savenirius is the Lighter 18. The Spirit of Salt doth for some time operate upon a Vein VVRiters do with one accord affirm Water to be the continent of the Fountains of the Spaw But we differ from them only in their Original because it is that which brings no small moment unto the Nobility of the same But in respect of the thing contained in the Waters they far disagree from us For indeed they affirm that Vitriol is in the Water of the Spaw and that Calchitis or red Vitriol Mysy Sory Melantera or Blacking Salt Nitre that Nitre I say hath been found to be in them by the examination of Distilling which elsewhere they never saw because they testifie it is that which since the Age of Hippocrates had failed from thence Bitumen or a liquid Amber the pit Coal Alume Bole Oker Red-lead the Mother of Iron the Vein of Iron Iron Aerugo or Verdigrease burnt Chalcanthum Burnt Alume also the Flour of Brass and Sulphur have therein discovered themselves These things I say we read to be attributed by Authors unto the Fountain of the Spaw under their Mistris Uncertainty and so they doubting unto what Captain they may commit so great an Army do conclude that there are some Fountains in which thou mayest most difficulty discern an eminent Subterraneous Matter Elsewhere in the Fountains of the Spaw that a Heat of Vitriol is tempered with the Cold of Red-lead and Brass In another place that the Fountains of the Spaw are actually cold and moist but in Power or Virtue which one Physitians do examine to be hot and dry and therefore especially because they extinguish Thirst At length they say that there is the Faculty of Iron Sulphur Vitriol and of other mineral Things in these Fountains yet an uncertain Proportion of the first Qualities remaining whether thou dost consider the Variety of subterraneous Things or the various Disposition of the Drinkers And I also read that that is to be noted That the Fountain Savonirius puts on it rather the Virtues of mineral Things than their Substance that is Faculties above without or not substantial ones For elsewhere they say that Fountains wax sharp by Vitriol alone and that Vitriol is of a most sharp Savour but in another place with Diascorides they find in Vitriol more of an ungrateful and earthy astriction than of a sharpness Lastly even as nought but the extream torture of the Fires doth allure forth a most sharpe Oyl out of Vitriol to wit a hungry and sulphurous Salt elevating the brassy Spirits So from hence they suppose Fountains to wax sharp and not otherwise to wit that such an Heat in the Earth doth stir up the sharp Spirits of Vitriol unto the Superficies of the Earth which being there constrained by Cold and changed into a sharp Matter are co-mixed with the neighbouring Fountain Which Position many Anguishes do accompany First Because there is no such voluntary Distillation in the Universe And then because at least the inward parts of the Earth according to Hippocrates are Cold in Summer to wit when the Water of the Spaw is at best Thirdly Because the Spirit of Vitriol cannot but gnaw the Earth or Rockie-stones which it toucheth and therefore put of all sharpness which is vainly dedicated to Fountains Fourthly Because in Summer the coldness of the Earth is not in its Superficies only because it is more in condensing the Spirits than the more inward Parts from whence they imagine the Spirits to be chased through the force of heat Fifthly Because the Spirits of Vitriol being immingled with the Water although negligently locked up do neither lay aside their sharpness nor are they tinged with a ruddie colour the which notwithstanding is altogether social unto Fountainous Waters Hitherto the Opinion of others hath led me aside I will confess my Blindness I at sometime seriously distilled Savenirius and Pouhontius and indeed I found not so great a Catalogue of Minerals yea not any thing in them besides Fountain-water and the Vitriol of Iron by other Writers before me neglected But the Vitriol of Mars consisteth of the hungry Salt of embryonated Sulphur and of the Vein of Iron not of Iron which Vein the hungry Salt being as yet volatile hath by licking corroded In which Act of corroding there is made a certain kind of Dissolution of the Vein it self and a coagulation or fixation of the volatile Salt The Salt I say as long as it is volatile that is apt by being pressed by the Fire to fly away is reckoned among Spirits But Bodies do not corrode Bodies as such neither do fixed things act on or into each other but only as one of them is volatile that is a Spirit whether it be grown together or liquid In the next place in all solution as may be seen in the activity of Aqua Fortis distilled Vinegar c. Some Exhalations are stirred up being before at quiet which as they are wild ones they do not again obey coagulation therefore the Waters do of necessity fly away or being restrained do burst the Vessels But besides that also is afterwards to be noted that how much of the Spirits hath compleated the solution of the Body so much also it hath assumed a corporality in the solved Body From hence therefore a reason plainly appeareth why the Waters of the Spaw in so great a clearness or perspicuity do hide in them the dark Body of the Vein of Iron Next why in the activity of an hungry Salt they do cast a smell of Sulphur notwithstanding the corporal Sulphur be absent At length it is also easie to be seen why the Waters about the end of their activity for that speediness of solution doth continue a longer or shorter time in diverse Fountains do loose their Sharpness and why the Vein being before transparent doth then appear ruddy To wit the Spirits being now partly chased away or the same being weakened and coagulated at the end of Activity the imbibed Vein settles and is manifested which before had remained hidden the Waters in the meantime recovering their natural or proper Simplicity Furthermore it is not
of the Disease of the STONE And likewise of sence or feeling Sensation pain unsensibility benummednesse motion unmoveablenesse Even as of Diseases of this sort the Leprosie Falling-Evil Apoplexy Palsie Convulsion Coma c. All things being new and paradoxal hitherto A Treatise profitable as well for a natural Philosopher and Physitian as for an Alchymist but most profitable for the Sick John Baptista van Helmont of Bruxels being the Author A TREATISE Of the Disease of the STONE PETRIFICATION Or the Making of a STONE CHAP. I. 1. THe Schooles of Medicine did already doubt before Paracelsus 2. The opininion of the Antients concerning the causes of making of a Stone 3. A sounder doctrine of Paracelsus 4 The flux of seeds for a Stone 5. The disposition of Minerals from the Creation of the World 6. What the Trival-line is 7. What the Flinty Mountain is 8. From whence the diversity of Stones is 9. The powder of the Adamant is alwayes yellow 10. Great or rocky stones and small stones how they differ 11. The seed of a stone wherein it exceeds a vegetable seed 12. Stonifying in a man and why a stone growes to the Tooth 13. Some remarkable things 14. Why some Insects do not become a stone but the more perfect Animals sometimes altogether 15. That the form is not introduced from the power of the matter 16. After what manner a man is made a stone 17. Nothing of a rocky stone is common with the stone in a man 18. The Duelech of Paracelsus 19. The praise of wild Carrot-seed c. THe more refined Physitians of the late past age were silently astonished at the Doctrine of the Schooles concerning the Elements Temperaments and Humours which was so unfortunate and un-obedient to their own positions For neither could they satisfie themselves with a quaternary of humours for all Diseases Wherefore it was most exceeding easie for Paracelsus who by a most excelling testimony of Medicines had drawn all Germany into the admiration of himself to perswade those that already doubted of the fiction of his Tartar that Tartar traiteroufly entring out of meates and drinkes was the true cause of any disease whatsoever which thought of his begat Credit and hath now fixed so stable a Root that there is not almost any one who doth not flee unto the Tartar of Parabelsus I did owe indeed a singular Treatise unto Tartar who was readily prepared for the History of the Stone but that I had abundantly written thereof among the Beginnings of Naturall Philosophy and therefore I had left that Volume maimed if I had from thence transferred the Treatise of Tartar hither For truly the Original integrity of Nature being there placed within the matter the Archeus and the Life or Form together with seminal Beginnings hitherto unheard of the Ferments also the Authors of any kind of transmutations whatsoever being newly discovered but the Elements Qualities Complexions and the fight strife contrarieties and victories of these being rejected Also the fictions of Humours and Catarrhs being banished out of Nature and Medicinal consideration At length Flatus's Tartars and the three first principles of the Chymists being excepted out of the place of exercise of Diseases and then I by degrees declining from things Speculative unto Discourses handling Affects have explained the defects and successive alterations of Nature and have pithily manifested to the World the true cause of Diseases hitherto unheard of Therefore the Stone being as a Monster bred at home in our own House I have named this Book as it were on Outlaw and now the errour of Tartar borrowed from Paracelsus being forsaken I now come unto Petrification or the making of a Stone unknown to the Schooles For indeed the Antients giving vp their Names to Aristotle do according to the principles of this man as yet think that all Stones and Minerals without distinction are made most especially of earth by the mediation of heat and cold as external workmen yet with some additament of the three other Elements Notwithstanding since the weight of the rocky Stone exceeded the weight of Water they from thence conjectured that the Earth might be the proper matter of all Minerals And although they doubted in the weight of Gold and knew neverthelesse that a Mathematical demonstration which is stronger than any Syllogism was to be fetcht from its weight yet in the mean time they could not believe having neglected their own dimensions that Gold was Earth many times piercing it self And now they distrusted their owne positions much more seeing they determined Gold to be composed not of Earth alone which is more ponderous than the other three Elements but of the other more light ones being mixed in a just or equal measure and proportion Therefore as destitute of counsel they hung the diligent search of its weight upon the nail and Controversies being laid aside they being as it were oppressed with drowsinesse were content with saying that mettals being as it were frozen with cold because they did again flow through the torture of the fire and the superfluity of water being dryed up but the ayr and fire being well nigh excluded remained as it were withered Thus the dry Phylosophy of Aristotle hath reported hereof But they proved their position as I have said For Mettals as they imagine flow all abroad through a contrary heat As if indeed a frozen work could not melt but by the service of the Bellows Or that earth should be capable of melting by fire And again at its pleasure could require the countenance of earth as oft as it should feel cold Are the Schooles so unmindfull of themselves in that they not so long since said that the Element of water is of it self vehemently cold and slackly moist and so that Mettals ought to be congealed not from earth but from Water But that the earth of it self is vehemently dry and slackly cold and so ignorant of congealing so that from hence it followes if Mettals in their chief part are earth they shall never be able to flow or be frozen up seeing that they shall be able to be at the most but remisly cold Neither by a heightned heat shall earth be ever able to be converted into water or a watery substance while it melted in the mettal For truly they grant unto the earth an intense or heightned dryth which cannot but be fortified by the fire but not destroyed thereby In like manner neither can the remiss or slack cold of the most strong earth convert this earth while by the force of the fire it should be dissolved into water again into earth Because they believe the remiss qualities of the Elements not to have so much activity as that they can break the intense qualities of another Element For with the same foot of stupidity wherewith they began they proceed to say that great and small stones are earth hardned and as it were withered with heat The which they prove by Potters earth which
Earth may be without and besides minerals I have demonstrated in my Treatises of Natural Philosophy But the most rich seed of this Store-house and Treasury seemes to be profesly neglected by Moses least Israel by attributing divine and immortal Powers to Fountains and Mountains should sacrifice unto them But besides the sand or earth being on every side con-tinual to its self having received a seed arose into Hills and Rocks and divided the Pavements of Stones For as the Rise of things began from a Miracle so now it adhereth to its second Causes that the invisible Archeus's of things and the hidden seeds thereof may testifie that they are likewise Governed by the intelligible World For from hence it is that the waters have remained gotten with Child through the desire of the seeds and the Almighty hath disposed the Idea's of his pleasure or Precept through the Water Yet these seminal desires of the water do not fructifie through a successive propagation of one thing by another after the manner of plants but a seminal vertue lurking in the Treasures of the water doth peculiarly stir up its own Of-springs from it self and successively perfect them For a seed or seminal and mineral Idea is included in the water which never goes out of it but locks up and incloseth it self in that matter until at length under the maturity of dayes that be made thereof which was born to be made of it The operative Image therefore in the waters doth receive a sensible and presently a fermentaceous odour from the flinty Mountain But the flinty Mountain is a Plantafle Pavement or space of earth wherein great stones small stones and all minerals draw their original out of the water even as elsewhere concerning the original of Fountains And moreover that Odour is the Ferment from whence a complete mineral seed doth at length issue From thence also is every Rocky stone But this seed is not in minerals by way of a Metaphor a certain Equivocal thing or proportionable resemblance under the licentious allusion of Similitude For new flints and stones do grow in Fountains and Rivers But whatsoever is made and so long as it is in making neither is as yet in its perfection intended by the Archeus hath a seed in it self so as that I may understand an Univocal or simple Nature to be in its own constituted parts For the water being purely clear having in it the seed and Ferment of a stone becomes the Crystal of all Gemes But if besides the pure colour of a certain mettal or Fire-stone shall concur it is made a Gemme following the hardnesse and properties of its owne coagulated Body For just even as Tinne which affords to Painters a yellow colour which they call Masticot makes every mettall its lead being taken away brickle So also it tingeth the hardnesse of Gemmes or precious Stones Therefore the Adamant or Diamond alone affords a yellow powder or dust and the powder of other Gemmes is white But if water not being purely transparent doth incorporate it self with a mettalick colour there is made a thick or dark stone a Jasper Agate Flint red Marble Marble c. and that according to the rerequirance of the mixed seed In the mean time Rocky stones are more easily dissolved than small flinty-stones and do again of their own accord or by Art return into water who converteth Rocks into pooles of waters But I say that Rocky stones are convertible into a lime and they sometimes perish of their own accord into the nourishing juyce of Fields and into Corny Beings or substances In Quarries of stones also a nitrous salt doth oftentimes voluntarily drop with a perpetual distillation to wit that Rocky stones may return into their first matter Even as on the other hand through a Rocky odour of the Ferment the whole water passeth into a Rocky stone or at least as to a part thereof wherein that odour radically grew together in it And that as well in time of flowing as of standing still in a pool But it was not as yet sufficient for the Divine Bounty to have made from the Beginning Rocks great stones and small stones and to have conferred a seed for propagating a new Of-spring whereby small or flinty and rocky stones should afterwards be made of waters But moreover he would have it that a stonifying seed should in many things exceed their own vegetables and should testifie that those seeds were more powerfull in these than themselves For neither doth the seed stonifie only with the water subjected unto it but moreover through the odour of the stonifying seed it makes the Body that co-toucheth with it become a rocky stone onely by touching upon it For so the Glove of Frederick the Emperour was stonified in one part thereof to wit in that part which he had for some time moistened beneath the water but in the other half or moity being fenced by a graven Impression it remained leather So that not onely Herbs Woods Breads Iron Egges Fishes Birds and four-footed Beasts are by a wonderfull Metamorphosis made a Rocky stone But also as Ambrose Pareus witnesseth there was at Paris a humane Young cut out of the Womb of a mature bignesse that was turned into a Rocky stone His Toe was broken and the Tendons and joynts of his Bones appeared within And likewise his Gum being broken for he was of a gaping and as it were howling mouth shewed a Tooth underneath in the sheath of the Cheek-bone The which a Friend testified to me who for the sharpening of Instruments in preparing Instruments designed for Mathematical demonstration is wont oftentimes to make a Whetstone in the back of this Young So likewise Histories makes mention that in Vaults nigh the City Pergamum now called Pergamo or Bargamo there were some dead Carcasses found to wit of those whom the fear of War had forced into hidden places that they were I say stonified from their superficies even to their Center From whence many particulars worthy of note do arise 1. That rocky stones are generated of their owne and proper seed and that they afterwards consist also of another stonifying seed that is such kind of seeds do not onely transchange the water as it were their proper and immediate Object but and also other strange Bodies which have drawn in the aforesaid seed onely in way of an Odour 2. And that therefore those strange Bodies ought at the least to bear a co-resemblance in something even in their remote matter Seeing they have nothing common at all besides that principating matter which in rocky stones is meer water For neither otherwise could the Fruits of divers Elements differing at least in the whole kind light together into one 3. But that rocky stones are not composed of a coagulable Tartar as of their proper and near matter but that they arise from a proper seed which was bred to stonifie any thing even of a matter not disposed unto a rocky stone 4. That
drying of Clay that is made by heat Learn ye therefore oh ye Schooles of me an unprofitable and the least of young Beginners that heat is through occasion of the loines but not the occasion of the stone or of the adhering sand That is the stone is not from heat but heat from the stone even as heat ariseth in the finger from a Thorne being thrust into it but the Thorne is not there made by heat For ye have heard the wailings of the Strangury or piâ—sing by drops but not of heat in the stone of the Bladder even as otherwise ye have heard complaints of heat in the Disease of the stone of the Kidnies wherefore if heat were the efficient cause of the stone there would be far greater complaints in the stone of the Bladder Because this stone by reason of its greater hardnesse should also be the of-spring of a greater heat and drying than that of the Reines And the rather because that doth almost continually swim in the Latex or urinal Liquor whereas the Kidney doth not any thing detain the trans-sliding uâ—ine Surely the stone of the Bladder should have need of a violent heat For the diseased complain of a sharpnesse burning heat and pain But these things are not felt in the nest of the Stone even as in the Nut of the Yard Therefore Children have known how to distinguish of the sense and place of sharpnesse and pain but not the Schooles But moreover although the urine may seem biting and sharp as if there were the burning of fire as in the Strangury yet being voided it is not any thing more hot or sharper to the tast or more salt than it was wont or is meet to be There is an apparent burning and tartnesse of the urine not indeed from a true heat or any sharpnesse of the urine but onely by reason of the forreignnesse of some certain small quantity of sharpnesse through a Ferment being co-mixed therewith which thing the Strangury teacheth being contracted by new Ales and those as yet fermenting from a sharpnesse Therefore Macc or Saffron being taken for they must be sharp and hot Medicines yea reaching to the very place if they ought to help and therefore by their odour testifying their presence in the urine the aforesaid burning heat for the most part ceaseth For it is a Philosophical truth that the stone increaseth by the same causes whereby it ariseth and so on the other hand But stones being joined to our Chamber-pots do confirm that the stone is naturally made and at leastwise without an actual heat of the Chamber-pot and encompassing Ayr or that heat is not required unto its constitution therefore the stone is made and increased materially of the urine but not of a vital muscilage nor that it doth require heat for its efficient cause and much lesse an excesse of the same heat For the mucky snivel doth not appear rejected or cast forth unlesse the stone be first present in the Bladder and so the cause as slow should have come after its effect For I have observed that if any one did pisse through a thick Towel and found not a muscilage herein yet but a few houres after that time his urine being strained thorow and filtred into a clean Glass had yielded a thin and red sand equally adhering thereunto neither also had it fallen down more plentifully about the bottome than it stuck about the sides of the Glasse And that thing had thus happened in a cold encompassing Ayr. Wherefore even from thence any one ought to be more assured that that sand had not gone forth with the urine in the beginning of his making water because it was not yet bred neither that it was actually in the urine For otherwise it had stood detained in the Towel however thin it had been like the atomes of Potters earth Or if the Towel being not thick enough had deceived him yet at least it had presently rushed unto the bottome in the likenesse of sand or a settlement neither had it affixed it self in its making in so great a grain and with so great a distance of equality to the sides of the Vessel Because it had wanted a glew whereby it might have been able to glew it self thereunto In the next place seeing that sand wants a glew throughout its whole Superficies except in that part wherein it adheres to the Chamberpot or Urinal it is sufficiently manifest that at one and the same instant wherein that sand was made it was likewise also glewed thereunto For from thence any one ought to be the more assured if he had ever toughly laboured in a diligent searching out of the truth that since that sand applyed it self to the Glasse of its owne free accord that it was also generated far after the making water to wit in the immediate instant before its affixing but that it being affixed however the most small it was in it self it afterwards encreased by additions Which effects indeed as they are wrought by a common nature growing or glistening in the urine and not from a particular atome of sand which affixed it self to the Vessel Hence also it equally departed and that at once out of the whole urine For from this so ordinary and daily handicraft Operation if the love of Health were cordially seated in the Schooles they ought for some Ages before now to have known nor indeed from an argument drawn from a Similitude and far fetcht but altogether from the Identity or same linesse of the urine and stony sand it self that for as much as that sand had grown together from the matter of the urine to wit of the same matter from whence the stone also was and that indeed though a muscilage of the matter and heat of the place were absent for the pewter Chamberpot stands in the cold encompassing ayr and likewise without the suspition of the affect of the stone or an infirmity of the pisser for also any the unblamed urine of healthy persons generates this sand and applyes it self to the urine therefore the sand and stone in us proceeds from stony causes to wit the same from which the urine becomes of a sandy grain in the Glasse without us being also healthy persons Which thing being by me seen I seriously sighed and certainly knew that the Schooles had erred in the knowledge of the cause and that they do even to this day stumble in curing of the Stone the which notwithstanding they rashly assume to themselves and presume of I greatly bewailed the stupidities and false devices of so many Ages and more that the unhappy Obediences strict Clientships paines and deaths of the sick the untimely destructions of Families and lastly the spoyles of Widows and Orphans had happened under unfaithful an ignorant helpers who deceived the World with the name of Phisitians For then I knew in good earnest that I knew nothing who had learned my princiciples from such as knew nothing I therefore disdaining the
oft-times seem presently to be eased and also to be cured yet cutting of a vein cannot but be disallowed seeing that Feverish persons are more successfully cured without the same For however at the first or repeated cuttings of a vein the cruelty of Fevers shall oft-times slacken Surely that doth no otherwise happen than because the Archeus much abhorreth a sudden emptying of the strength and an undue cooling and so neglects to expell the Feverish matter and to perform his office But they who seem to be cured by blood-letting surely they suffer a relapse at least they obtain a more lingering and less firm health which Assertion the Turks do prove and a great part of the world who with me are ignotant of the opening of a vein because it is that which God is no where read to have instituted or approved of yea not so much as to have made mention thereof But as to what belongs unto the first scope of a co-betokeming sign which is called Cooling Truly the letting out of the blood cooleth by no other title than as it filcheth from the vital heat But not that it obtains a coolifying and positive power In which respect at least such a cooling ought to be hurtful Why I pray in a Hectick Fever do they not open a vein Doth not that Fever want cooling or doth it cease to be a Fever But blood is wanting in Hecttick Fevers wherefore through defect of blood and strength there is an easie Judgement of hurt brought by Phlebotomy which otherwise the more strong faculties do cover In the year 1641. Novemb. 8. the body of Prince Ferdinand brother to the King of Spain and Cardinal of â—oledo was dissected who being molested with a Tertian ague for 89 dayes dyed at 32. years of age For his heart liver and lungs being lifted up and so the veins and arteries being dissected scarce a spoonful of blood flowed into the hollow of his breast Indeed he shewed a liver plainly bloodless but a heart flaggy like a purse For but two dayes before his death he had eaten more if it had been granted unto him He was indeed by the cuttings of a vein purges and leeches so exhausted as I have said yet the Tertian ceased not to observe the order of its intention and remission What therefore hath so great an evacuation of blood profited or what hath that cooling plainly done unless that those evacuaters were vain which could not take away so much as a point of the Fevers Is that the method of healing which makes a Physitian whom the Almighty hath created and commanded to be honoured by reason of the necessity of him If that method knows not how to cure a Tertian ague in a young man to what end shall it conduce Is that the art whereof the infirm and unhealthy person stands in need I wish and wish again that that good Prince had not made use of it who when the returning from Cortracum was saluted by the Senate of Bruxells recovering from the agony of death by reason of the diminishments of his blood and strength then walked in good health about his Chamber Physitians therefore abhor to expose their feverish persons to the encountring of cold things to wit whereby they might presently and abundantly experience the vertue of cooling things by a manifest token because they put not much trust in their own rules of Heats and Coolers For since it is already manifest that the whole heat in a Fever is that of the very vital spirit it self it follows also that the cooling which is made by cutting of a vein is meerly that of the vital spirit and together also an exhausting of the blood and an impoverishment thereof For if a Fever be to be cured as a distemper by cutting of a vein as a cooling remedy Alas the contrary is manifest by the exhausting of all the blood out of the Prince the Infanto of Spain In whom as yet but the day before his death the Tertian Ague kept its fits â—o great cooling not hindering it and if others intens a curing even in a Quotidian only by cold which they writ to be kindled of putrified Phlegm at leastwise that cooling should be far more easily obtained by exposing the sick half naked unto the blowing of the North or West wind or by hanging him up in water or a deep well until he should testifie that he were sufficiently cooled For so they should prefently and abundantly perfect a cure if their conscious ignorance did not within condemn their own feverish essence of heat Therefore a Fever is not a naked Tempest of heat but an occasional vitiated matter is present for the expelling whereof the Archeus being as it were wroth doth by accident inflame himself The which as long as it shall be neglected in the Schools the curings of Fevers will be rash destructive and conjâ—ctural therefore none shall owe any thing worthy of giving thanks unto Physitians seeing they are cured by the voluntary goodness of nature and I wish they were not put back by Physitians But unto the argument of curing by sudden cold the Schools will answer that there is a perilous departure from one extream unto another By which excuse of their ignorance they stop the mouth of the people as if they spake something worthy of credit not taking notice that they therein contradict themselves while as they praise and prefer the cutting of a vein before laxative medicines chiefly for that end because it presently and abundantly succours by cooling and therefore they have given it the surname of a speedy and universal succour For they constrain their own impotency founded in ignorance unto the will of a Maxim badly understood and worse applied For truly it is not be doubted but that it is lawful presently to cut the halter of him that is hanged that he who was deprived of air may enjoy it as soon as may be Likewise that it is lawful presently to place him that is drowned in a steep scituation that he may cast back the water out of his lungs That it is lawful I say to draw any one presently to the bank and that it is lawful presently to free a wound from its indisposition and to close it with a scar For so very many wounds are closed in one only day because a solution of that which held together wants nothing besides a re-uniting of it self That it is lawful presently to repose a broken or diplaced bone Likewise that it is lawful in the Falling Sickness Swooning Fainting Cramp to recall the weak as soon as one can presently to loosen the detainments of excrements and presently to stop the excessive flux of womens issues For neither must we think that nature rejoyceth in her own destruction and that from an healthy state she indeed le ts in sudden death but refuseth a remedy which may suddenly repell a disease otherwise she should not do that which in things possible is most exceeding
by ungrateful dissolved bodies and afterwards a superlative one by grateful Dissolvents 24. A general kind of Medicine 25. A conclusion unto Physitians 26. The praise of the volatile salt of Tartar This ulcerous or corrupt age of most perverse Wits will not suffer those that are admonished to repent For so far are they as yet from that that most Practitioners refuse to enquire into these greater Secrets because they every where inveigh against Sciences which they are ignorant of But because they are altogether ignorant of the same they both almost triumph and also gratifie each other concerning their ignorance neither is it manifest that they have spent their time in those things unprofitably because it shameth them not to have a vile esteem of Chymical Science by Writings and Taunts as a smoak-selling and delusive or false Art But they know not that since of a Non-being there is no knowledge and no conception in the mind answering thereunto Therefore also in that whereby they deny the truth of science they manifest that they are ignorant of the same that is vilely to esteem of that which they are wholy ignorant of And there are others who more mildly but alike blockishly say 1. Those things belong not to our judgment or employment they no way touch at medicinal affaires for we follow things approved from of old 2. Chymical medicines cast a smel of corruption being hot violent and not common 3. We have Servants who faithfully prepare those medicines which are for use And it is unseemly for a learned man to excercise the composition or preparation of medicine 4. The smoak-selling Experimentators institute all horrid evacuations being full of terrour because they are supported only by Mercury and Antimony they being manifest poysons And so they are to be reputed among Mountebanks or Juglers These are those things which they by reason of their ignorance thrust upon the unwary vulgar whereunto I in order thus give satisfaction We treate of medicines but not of things which concern a corriar or potter They therefore suppose a shamefull evasion that they are ignorant of what it had behoved them to learn Neither also is there a trusty foundation from antiquity it being always ruinous they going where it hath been gone not where they were to go they alwayes following the flock of predecessours and mutually subscribing to each other through the blind judgments of their mind our fugitive servants also will answer I being silent from whom they borrow the corrosive powder of Precipitate and of another more sweet or lesse poysonsome and likewise the vitrum or glasse of Antimony and the floures thereof Cinabrium and in summe nothing but poysons for the transplantings and cloaking of great diseases But all things notably adulterated for the desire of gain For it is easie to deceive the ignorant in things which they professe themselves to be ignorant of For there are essential oiles set to sale and the which are valued at a great price they being all and every of them adulterated whether nine parts of oyle of Almonds were co-mixed with one part of essential oyle is a matter of easie experiment For cast it on a sponefull of Aqua vitae and whatsoever shall swim atop let it be the essential oyle but the rest oyle of Almonds And that thing thou shalt the more certainly know if thou shalt make tryal in a Bath The oyle of Sulphur is for one half of it raine water but the distillation of Vitriol is brought wholly into deceit and is more frivolous dayly The which will presently be manifest through a simple examination by a Bath That scarce a sixth part thereof is the pure distillation and that as yet loaded with the tincture of oaken bark In the next place unto the second particular I will by and by answer Now it is sufficient to have said that the more choice Physitians at this day do not despise Chimical remedies the which their bookes do lately testifie And so the Fox dispraiseth Grapes and Hens that are sequestred from him in the Tree But how much they can performe the experienced sick do speak though we be silent Unto the third It is no disgrace or uncomelinesse to have prepared some the more choice remedies with ones own hand and to have bequeathed and delivered those medicines unto his posterity by his hands For neither was it an unbeseeming thing for the High Priest of the Hebrewes to have struck down Oxen and to have played the butcher for the salvation of the people Is it happily a more glorious thing for the Galenical rout to have viewed stinking dung and to have stirred it with a stick than for us to have handled Furnaces vessells and coales surely if they had the weight of truth they would knowthat the works of charity do not defame any one But they who have not charity account all things disgracefull besides gaine and Lucre. Depart ye from this pride and be ye mercifull as your Father which is in heaven is mercifull For else he will say I know you not that live for gaine and deceite But indeed disgrace hinders not these somewhat ambitious ones but ignorance and the covetous desire of Lucre For they make more account of the number of visits than of the glory of curing which wholly buries it self in having done well For as soon as they are dismissed from the Schooles with the title of Doctour they enquire through the Streets and Inns with the eyes of a Lamprey whether there are not sick folks which may entrust them with their life But stop your proceedings Medicine is not to be excercised after the manner of Mechanick arts And because Physitians err in this point the Father of Lights withdrawes his gifts after that Medicine is managed as a Plow Possess ye Charity and gain Will voluntarily follow you with Honour and Glory the which take hold of a Physitian that shuns them whom the most High hath commanded to be honoured Unto the fourth I grant that all kind of Knaves have most licentiously thrust themselves into Chymistry no less than into Medicinal Affairs and that a various destruction doth thereby daily arise unto mankind on whom surely the Magistrate ought of right to be severe in punishment But these things do not defame honest men It is certain that deceit and the adulterating of Medicines have always been annexed to gain But as to what pertains to the reproach of Remedies Chymists that is to be sifted by a larger Discourse First of all it is suitable in this place That Science or Knowledge hath no enemy but the ignorant person Not any such one but him that is proud and refuseth to learn The which is manifest by the already mentioned Corrosives and indeed manifest poysons that they become sweeter than Sugar The same thing is also more easily manifest and to our hand For truly Scarwort Frogwort Apium risus c. do forthwith in distilling lay aside their embladderring power
triumph that they propose to others what they have tasted down with the tip of their lips and so they have nor yet had access unto the inner Chambers of Phylosophy But again the Galenists will urge saying that the stones of Bezoar Crabs Snails c. being taken as well by way of a powder as being dissolved in a sharp dissolving liquor do notably profit in the Plague Fevets the disease of the Stone wounded persons and in those that are thrown down from an high place wherefore that the same thing is blockishly denied by me in Pearls Corals c. whereto I answer That gems small or flinty stones and rockie stones have much latitude and that they differ very much among themselves For first of all Gems Flints Marbles and whatsoever things have a Christalline hardness do not any thing act or suffer on us or from us unless by way of a remedy hung on and bound about the body and that so long as from the mouth they pass thorow the superfluities of the Body The virtue therefore of these is feeble because it layes hid as being shut up in a too thick body But Pearls and Corals and whatsoever stones have the rocky hardness of Shell-fishes do indeed yield to Gems in hardness yet they are not therefore concocted in the stomach of man as they are well in some birds But the stones of Bezoar Crabs c. being as yet less hard then Pearls are not of a rocky nature but they are made rather of a milky juice half cheesed and half stonified and they have the nature of a Tophus or sandy stone being neutral between a gristle and a stone even as the shells of stones in medlars peaches c. do keep a neutral and middle kind between woods and a sandy stone These things being for the truth of the matter and the better understanding thereof thus supposed I say That although the stone of Bezoar of Crabs c. as to the solide matter of their powder are in no wise digested by mans stomach yet there is in them a certain milkie and muscilaginous juice of great virtue yet of small quantity Such as also happens to be extracted out of the shaving of Harts-horn by seething If therefore thou dost a good while boil the powder of the aforesaid stones in rain or distilled water if thou separatest the decoction from the powder by straining it through a Filter but dost in distilling this decoction by a bath draw it forth thou shalt at length find some small quantity of the aforesaid Muscilage But the remaining powder as it is unconquered by boyling so also it remains undigested by our stomack And so from the small quantity of the aforesaid liquor there dependeth a reason why one only dram of that stone being powdered and taken in some liquor effecteth more then otherwise one scruple of the same doth when as in the mean time the Wine or Vinegar being drunk up at the same draught with the aforesaid powders do not dissolve the sixth part of the powder but the rest they forsake entire not changed which is manifest if thou shalt drink the stone of crabs being not beaten into powder but into pieces and after voiding them forth shalt wash them clean thou shalt find the same weight thereof which there was before and so nothing thereof to be subdued by the stomack nor any thing of those stones to be participated of by the digestion Come on then I will also press the Galenists with their own weapon for if the aforesaid Stones or Pearls being taken by way of a powder should melt in us ye attempt in vain to dissolve them Therefore it is already manifest by handicraft operation that the more tender Stones of living creatures do contain a Muscilage which Pearls Corals and rocky Stones do want yet the bodies of somethings remaining in their pouder and homogeneal and unseparable solidity as they suffer in their dissolution an action from the dissolver so also in like manner the dissolver suffers by the body dissolved without any participation in the mean time of the unchangeable body for from the Chymical Maxim The dissolvent is by the same endeavour coagulated whereby the body dissolved is dissolved And therefore if the body dissolving be taken away from the body dissolved nothing is ordinarily recovered from thence besides a water without savour being without actimony and sharpness the which surely as they are the Clients of Salts they are coagulated in the thing dissolved and stand by it as Companions Thou shalt know the same thing more clearly if thou distillest the Oyl of Vitriol from running Mercury the Oyl is coagulated with the Mercury and they both remain in the bottom in the form of snow And whatsoever is distilled from thence is meet water but that snow if it be washed is made a citron coloured powder which is easily reduced into the former running Mercury being altogether of the same weight as it was before but if thou shalt distil the water of the washing off thou hast in the bottom a meer Alum from the sharp salt of Vitriol For so dissoluents are changed although the bodies dissolved have not lost any thing of their own matter or substance And such dissolvers act on us by way of an alteration attained in their own sufferingness but not from a property partaked of from the dissolved bodies being unchanged Therefore to the argument proposed The salts of vinegar wine juice of Lemons or of the Oak and likewise of the sharp chyle of the stomach as they are vegetables and alterable by our digestion by digesting indeed are changed in us into a urinary salt notwithstanding by reason of the diversity of the thing dissolved those dissolutives suffer something from the aptness of their own convertibility yet they transfer not any thing on us of the thing dissolved that is not digestible unless it contain the digestible part of it self even as I have said concerning the milky muscilage of the stones of soulified creatures But if indeed otherwise such a dissolved body should proceed inwards into the veins which it never doth that it might communicate its endowments unto us to wit pearls or the aforesaid stones very many anguishes would follow from thence instead of succours For first since they are not digested in the stomach even as I have already proved neither in the next place shall they be able to be cocted in the second digestion because there is no passage unto the second but through the first Secondly therefore they shall never be converted into bloud but into some other superfluity of the veins Thirdly powders shall be bred in the veins and kidneys and they shall be stopped up with the powder being a forreign guest never to be drawn out by any remedy for the future These things are spoken concerning thigs dissolved by a dissolving vegetable and therefore digestible in us Notwithstanding if things are dissolved by dissolvers that are not digestible
a disease 537 Death began from carnal lust 550 676 In divine things the Senses are to be cast off 310 13 What a Disease is 452 The difficulty of curing Diseases concluded from the Seat of the Soul 455 Of Diseases according to their occasional cause 565 Their division 566 How Diseases enter the Body 567 Most Diseases are centrally in the Stomach 261 10 Diseases concentred in the vital Spirit proved by dissection 485. Of the essence of Diseases 488 558 Hitherto unknown 489 171 145 A Disease is a real Being 947 Hunger no Disease 494 Diseases pierce the formal Light 496 A Disease begins from the matter of the Archeus 502 The product of a Disease differs from a Symptom 999 How a diseasie occasion augmenteth it self 521 Cure of Diseases not furthered by Anatomy 524 Diseases varie in respect of a six-fold digestion 620 What the ground of Diseases is 404 15 407 40 c. 430 3 448 60 238 21 269 Lunar Diseases their Symptoms 140 148 Diseases Produced by concupiscence 524 Cure of Diseases 446 The roots of Diseases from the beginning 1092 What the Dew is 68 23. What it abounds with 117 33 Decoctions censured 970 Defluxions of the Bladder ridiculous 856 Distilling without any Caput Mortuum remaining 404 18 Distilled waters of small force 970 Distillation of Vitriol 891 Distillation of Urine 847 Observations thereon ibid. Distillation unfolds natural Philosophy 692 Â 8 Of Diet its uselesness as to curing 451 9 c. Of the nature of Diuretickâ— 862 863 Of the dispensatories of the Schools 461 24 Thâ—ir hurtfulness ibid. 28 Illustrated by two Examples 464 43 Things externally applyed operate under the sixth digestion 479 48 A six fold Digeston 480 57 206 What a depraved digestion produceth 1104 Of the Retents of digestions 625 626 1003 The digestive Ferment what 201 206 What things help digestion ibid Of the threefold digestion of the Schools 203 703 16 There is as many suitable Ferments as digestions 206 2. From whence the force of digestion springs 207 21 Whâ—t helps it 703 17. The first digestion 207 The second digestion 209 21 22 The second and third digestion are begun at once 210 28 The third digestion where it begins 212 Digestion in the stomach not a formal transmutation of meats 215 48 When digestion may be said to be finished ibid. The fourth digestion its Seat 218 60 The fifth digestion ibid. The sixth digestion 219 67 Our digestions why attributed to the Planets 748 Supream of all digestions in the stomach 290 4 Death how it comes to â—e 649 8 After what sort death entred the Apple 657 41 Death followed sin 664 19 Death comes not from a dry habit of the Body 729 Death is from a decay of vital powers 730 Several occasions of Death 752 753 Drif what it is and what required thereto 595 Manner of making it 596 Dâ—atages observed 278 33 What drinks best in sharp sicknesses 454 22 24 The actions of the phansie from the Duumvirate 303 31 The power of desire in the Duumvirate 304 37 The Harmony of life from the Duumvirate 306 52 Fatness from the Duumvirate 308 59 The Duumvirate 337 Its Power Seat and Works 340 341 364 49 Vnderstanding is formed in the Duumvirate 275 Why the Spleen and Stomach are called the Duumvirate 287 26 Authority of the Duumvirate 296 The Dropsie Anasarcha whence 449 62 Its seat 515 Dropsie unknown 507 Not seated in the Liver 509 How stirred up 512 What the efficient matter thereof is 513 The Cure 521 A Bastard Dropsie ibid What abstinence from drink may effect in the Dropsie 519 Of Dungs and Toads in the Dropsie 519 520 Why drowned Bodies swim after a season 427 73 Drowsiness as well artificial as natural helped by Lixiviums 303 31 The vanity of drying up superfluities 440 42 Of drunkenness 449 63 Of being drunk with new Wine 122 23 Duelech of Paracelsus 833 Duelech is made of the Urine 836 837 Three Spirits concur for the nativity of Duelech 850 Its manner of making with an observation of the Fountains of the Spaw 851 What may be found in Duelech 861 Of the savour of Dungs 212 26 VVhere the Forment of Dung resideth 221 811 E. EArth why not reckoned among the primary Elements 49 16 11â— 44 What the Oxiginal Earth is â—0 3. 'T is Called the foundation of nature 4. ibid. It breaks forth to light in some places 51 5 The Earth is a fruit of the water 66 23 The various distinct Pavements of the Earth 94 5 The diversity of Soils in the Earth 688 3 In the last Soil the waâ—ers live 689 Of Earth-quakes 93 2 c. It is alwayes a threatner of punishments 102 33 Ear-wax good for pricking of the sinews 247 Eels bred by Honey and Dew c. 478 37 1026 65 Of the virtue of the Liver and Gaul of an Eele 304 46 An informative Similâ— of an Eg. 45 12 113 10 The prayse of Elecampane 703 10 Of the Elements 48 The two Elements Water and Air untransmutable 65 7 69 1 Their co-mixture no constitutive principles of bodies 134 24 Elements do not fight nor have contrariety 168 They Cannot destroy each other 1048 16 Electrum of Paracelsus against Inchantments 65 Elixir proprietatis and its prâ—paration 574. Elixir proprietatis not made without the Liquor Alkahest 813 Of the Embrio of a Bull-Calf its use 883 Of Endemicks 188 Endemical things are drawn in by breathing 189 7 The Progress of Endemical things 191 13 The Epitaph of an Emperour 528 Of the Ephialtes or night-Mare from what stirred up 299 15 Epilepsie whence stirred up 114 17 Erisipelas its Cure 475 29 114 17 Essence what it is 414 76 81 And in some things not so effectual when separated ibid. 78 Eve not cursed 654 13 Eve not appointed to bring forth in pain 654 14 Eve destowred in Paradice 666 33 Excrementitiousness whence caused 430 4 Extracts their invalidity 459 12 F. OF the infection of a dead Falcon. 1134 Fasting when easily brooked 24 51 Fever not cured by Phlebotomy 953 A Fever hitherto unknown 935 Thirst in Fevers examined 936 Drink allowed in Fevers 453 â—9 902 Caution about their food 454 24 Flesh to be shun'd ibid. Whence Cold and then hot 471 4 973 VVhat the Sunochus Diary and Hectick Fever are 978 Seat of a pâ—trid Fever 978 The occassional cause of Fevers twofold 979 980 986 The Cure 987 A Diary and Hectick affect onely the vital Spirit 973 Essence of Fevers discovered 1002 Feverish matter swims not in the Blood 956 The essence of Fevers not from heat 940 The seat of intermitting Fevers 948 The original of Camp-Fevers 1096 The poysonous Excrement in Fevers included in the Midriff 331 25 VVhat a Ferment is 31 24 c. By what continued 1124 Ferments being different do cause different operations 479 48 115 26 No transmutation without it 111 1207 2 Why commanded not to be used 111 1 Its properties c. 112 3 c. The
product that is the Latex And so a Remedy cloakative and unto the latter or effect is applied In the next place the whole spring of this evil hath been banished into the guiltless head of man into Rheums raining down out of the head The cause whereof if they have erred from they ought also consequently to have strayed in the Remedies For I remember that a Pleurisie beginning hath presently failed or ceased through a plentiful Sweat the Sweat being allured by such a Diaphoretick as is that of the flowers of wild Poppy Colts or Nags dung he juyce Daysie and the assistance of the like Lastly I have also noted that there are notable Glandules or Kernels under the Arm-pit in the Groyn and behind the ears and likewise in the passage of the Urine nigh the Bladder and about the gut Duodenum and almost innumerable ones elswhere placed at the two-forking of every vein The one only use whereof the Schools will have to be to wit that the vessels may not be subject to tearing But surely there is a manifest errour in the use named For notable Glandules should be in vain behind the Ears where there is no fear of tearing as neither within moreover the fleshy membrane it self is not stretched out and so Glandules could not be there placed but in vain for a vanishing use and end That is the Arbitrator of nature hath erred in the use of the Glandules or the Schools do erre seeing that in none of the aforesaid places wherein the Glandules are seated the vessels can depart from each other And also a slender Ligament had better and more commodiously preserved the renting of a vessel than a tearable and tender Glandule I do every where take good notice of the perpetual carelessness of the Schools of narrowly searching into the Truth For they do not diligently mark that the aforesaid Glandules are not but for the emunging or attractive alluring of the Latex out of the veins that they may disperse Sweats into the habit of the body which thing in the Tongue is manifest to the fight where the Glandules do make or work the Spittle and therefore do they allure the Latex But under the Arm-pits and in the Groyn Sweats do proceed But they do not foresee a rending of the vessels The former indeed is a daily office but the other is not but an unownted rare and rather a ridiculous one For the overflowing Latex doth load the Veins by oppression and if they are free from the same the Archeus as it were breathing back again doth retake to him new strength unhoped for Therefore the ignorance of the Humor Latex hath invented and supported Cauteries or searing Remedies hath feigned Catarrhs and hath caused all disagreeing Remedies or Succours to be dreamed of For nothing of solidity against Diseases hath hitherto been weighed Because I shall shew in its place that the Beginnings of Diseases have as yet to this day layn hid unknown and therefore also that Remedies are vain tryals neither conteyning any thing of certainty unless they be naturally endowed with a specifical property for certain Diseases otherwise a conjectural uncertainty will prepare privy shifts for them and the credulity of the Sick hath fortified Physitians which same Remedy although it should be said to be appropriated to a Disease it doth not help any body yea neither do purging Medicines although they should undoubtly loosen the belly comfort the Sick by reason of the diversity of Complexions and of feigned stubborn Humors For they suppose to wit that such a Humor offendeth and they see it afterwards to be brought forth by loosening Medicines yet they see nothing of the fierceness of the Disease to be slackened Therefore when they ought to acknowledge their ignorance founded in Humors and purging things they reflect themselves on the variety of Complexions and the uncertain and unknown differences of distempers which things surely if they are beheld with an equal mind they shall not be terminated in any other end than into a full knowledge ignorance and overthrow of the principles of Healing hitherto Wherefore I exhort and humbly beseech Physitians that they do in time well learn the unheard of Beginnings Positions and unaccustomed Maxims of Medicine Wherefore I have judged it meet to digress a little in this place For as I have seen an Atrophia or Consumption for lack of nourishment to be occasionally supported by the Humor Latex So also I have seen Fatness or Grossness in one only two months time by a Urine-provoking drink instead of Ale or Beer to be wholly expelled But forreign potions of China Sarsaparilla Guaiacum c. which should pour forth the Latex by Sweats by a feigned and lying title have attained the name of dryers And indeed I have already before demonstrated that every visible body that which is believed to be composed by a mixture of the Elements is materially made only of the Element of water which originally hath it self in all constituted things in manner of a Latex and the which also here to have supposed is sufficient as being once sufficiently prooved And then the Maxim of Phylosophy hath it That Bodies are not changed into each other unless they are first reduced into their first and easie following or clammy Matter For although they would have that thing applyed to metallicâ— Transmutations yet it is to be drawn out of the noted sublunary Transmutations of any things Yet not that they will have bodies to be reduced into the first matter of Aristotle yea nor also into the first Separation of the Elements for neither do they think that the Food ought to return into its own Element that it may thereby be made bloud but they will have a body to be transchanged into its next matter or that the subject of the former life ought to return back before it hath fixed a hope of the bound of Transmutation to be attained To which end be it certain that meats and drinks do assume the nature of a Chyle or juyce in the stomach with a retaining of the qualities of the middle life of the meats Indeed that the ancient matter of the meats is destroyed and made to approach very neer to the matter next to the Latex or the Element of water to wit the specifical Ferment of the stomach being busily employed to this end no otherwise than as the Ferment of the Liver doth transchange the Chyle into venal bloud and whose companion and fellow the Latex is but not likewise a part thereof But so differing and singular gifts of Ferments do exist in nature that some living creatures do make venal bloud flesh c. for themselves yea and also an Oylie grease and water only for in the stomach of a Salmond Fisher-men say never any Food or edible thing was found There are moreover in salt-Salt-waters some waterish little living creatures in whom scarce any thing is bred which do communicate a certain Seed of water
the Legs is recocted into good Blood about the Ancles without the Shop of Sanguification and dominion of the Liver That is that the once out-hunted and cocted Blood is by a forreign agent and unfit organ at length received into favour that it doth by an inspired motion retire into the mouths of the Veines and is received or associated as equally fit for vital Offices But whence do they spend so much labour in drying up of the Dropsical affect that they can scarce command a possible abstinence of one year from liquid things if the Dropsie be the vice of the one Digestion of the Liver Why do they referre it among Diseases offending onely in moisture the which was to be attributed unto a full half Digestion For I will first dispute about the Liver and under the same by-work I will discover the occasional cause of the Dropsie I saw a certain un-savory Simple nor by any meanes to be manifested administred by a Physitian in the Suspition of the Stone of the Kidneys which suspended the Urine for eights dayes and even unto death the which presently before death was loosed and then it throughly be-pissed the bed cloathes The Disease brought forth another thing like it For truly neither in the Urine-pipe or Bladder appeared any obstacle after dissection But he had his left Kidney triangular free or undamnified from all obstruction and Stone But the right Kidney was plainely monstruous and scarce of the bigness of a Filburd-nut Therefore he had pissed 76 years with his left Kidney not letted or stopped That the Liver therefore is guiltless in the Dropsie I will declare my experiences For because the precepts of the Schooles did the less satisfie me in the Dropsie therefore I was wont being as yet a young Man to hasten although not called unto the Dissections of Dropsical Bodies that I might search out the birth-places of the Dropsie For I thought with my self to what end hath there been Anatomie now for two thousand years if there be not at this day a more successful curing of the Dropsie than in times past For wherefore are we the Butchers of dead Carcases if we do not learn by the errors of the Antients If we do not amend fore-past things For we flee unto Anatomie with a prejudice and sweep the purses of Heires if we do not look into the causes of Death that we may learn the cures For truly dissection profits the Dead nothing Heires also do not expend their moneys that they may heal the dead by Anatomy and much less that they may wound the same least happily he should rise againe nor also that they may learn to cure others which are unwilling to be healed But only the dead Carcase is opened for the Physitian and that he may more perfectly learn the Heire paies the reward of his learning Thus Oxen yee that yoaked are The Plow not for your selves do beare But Physitians seeing they scarce any longer expect to learn they stand by stop their Noses and hope by the expences of the Heires for the most part to escape the mark of Death A Lawyer after divers Gripings or Wringings of his Bowels died of a Dropsie But in the Dissection we saw his Liver without blemish An English-man my Neighbour by eating his fill of roasted Porke sliding into a daylie Flux and presently after into a Dropsie he died and being dissected his Liver was seen to be unhurt Hitherto also doth the Tragedie of Count Stegrius tend In the Autumne of the year 1605. I returning out of England to Antwerp found some hundreds after a malignant and popular Fever to be dropsical I cured many and many under the unhappy experiments of others in the mean time Perished But that People have a perswasion in them that unless all the Water be drawn out of the dead Carcases the Dropsie will passe over into the next Heire And so they are Solicitous of Dissection And I certainly affirme that I found the Liver of none defiled A certain Citizen was long pained between his bastard Ribs neither breathed he without Pain at length the Conjectures of Physitians being tried he died of a Dropsie But his Liver was seen to be without hurt One pertayning to the Kings Treasurie of Brabant after a sudden pissing of Blood was long handled by Physitians in vain and thefore being sent by his Physitians unto the Fountains of the Spaw he returning began to shew a hardness in the left Side of his Abdomen under his Ribs and thereupon the Leg of that side was swollen But the chief Physitians and those of Lovain although they saw his Urine like unto that of healthy Persons and thereby did betoken his Liver to be guiltless yet they desisted not from the continual use of solutive opening and Urine-provoking things yea they gave him steel diversly masked against the obstructions of the Liver to drink And at length having a huge Abdomen he Perished with a Dropsie For neither was there place for excuse as to say they were called late who were present with him from the hour of his bloudie Pissing But his dead Carcase being dissected his Liver was found innocent But his left Kidney had swollen and that more than was meet with a clot of out-hunted Blood such as is in a boyled Gut A Major of Souldiers from a bloudie Flux which was at length appeased died of a Dropsie whose Liver notwithstanding was without blemish however the Schooles may grin A certain Merchant keeping his bed through a Colick of four months fell into a Dropsie but being dissected he had his Liver without fault A Woman of sixty years old hearing in the night Theeves at the windows and rising dashed her Belly beyond the Breast-bone against a corner of the Table But first it pained her and then her Menstru'es brake forth as she thought the which although it was little yet it desisted not but with the birth of a Dropsie it also expurged into the masse of a greater Tympanie But she being dissected Her Liver offered it self undefiled Another old Woman being vexed with a more cruel Husband after inordinate menstru'es Perished with a Dropsie and shewed an unblamed Liver A certain Hand-maid hanging some washed webs of Cloath to high for her Stature sliding into a flux of the Womb at length died of a Dropsie neither offered her Liver it self guiltie to the beholders A Cuaplaine of Bruxells of the age of 31 years complaines to me of the shortness of his Breath he shews his Legs to be puffed up and his Belly to be swollen And he saith that his Cod was swelled to the bigness of ones Head For I saw that he had a face bespotted with red pricks or spects as it were with the marks of stripes He as yet celebrated the Masse yet with difficulty presently after three dayes from thence he suddenly dieth but he being dissected his Belly was found to be without water But in his Breast much Blood had choaked him And
so a small vein being burst had caused a difficult breathing and did also dissemble a Dropsie But when as the rupture of the vein being more rent had poured forth its Blood it choaked the man A certain Dropsical Man and but one onely being seen by me shewed a black and stinking Bubble in the hollow of his Liver Barth-Cabrollius an Anatomist of Mount-Pellier Saith that he cured very many Dropsical Persons by Incision made in the very Navill it self standing out and that in both sexes But surely if the errour had been in the Liver it could not have issued forth with the water through the Navil or that the Liver being mortally defiled should admit of a restoring Which thing the Schooles will not admit of Wherefore I remember that I have restored above two thousand Dropsical Persons also whose Urine did now wax-blackish with Bloodinesse and who had scarce made a spoon-ful of water in one night whose Liver if it had had but even a mean and not a mortal fault I consess I had not Cured them I have seen also that they whose Liver hath been notably wounded have escaped who although they thenceforth fore-perceived the Storms of the Aire yet not the Dropsie I have seen moreover those whose last day a slow Fever had closed in whose Liver small Stones had grown yet they had not shewn a Dropsie It is a familiar thing for the Liver of Oxen to abound with small Stones although they are continually fed with grasse Whence at leastwise I have learned that Grass-roots do never remove the obstructions of the Liver The Schooles will say to these things the Dropsie indeed is not made from a visible corrupting or obstruction of the Liver as neither from the Salt of the feigned Jamenous-alume as otherwise hath seemed to Paracelsus but from a meer cold and moist Distemperature thereof for so a large Flux of Blood because it brings the aforesaid distemperature it causeth the Dropsie But this is wholly prattle old Wives Fables and vain sounds For first of all I have sufficiently demonstrated the nullities of mixtures and temperatures not any more to be repeated 2. I have seen many all the venal Blood of whom a Consumption had exhausted so as that scarce two ounces had remained when their Heart Lungs and Liver were plucked out but their Liver was of a yellowish Colour because it was without Blood yet there was no cold and moist distemper in these Livers as neither a Dropsie the Supposed son of its feigned Mother 3. If much Flux of Blood should generate cold and moist distemperatures surely the Schooles do not affirm that thing to be done but by the reason of a withdrawing of the vital Spirit which alone is the cause of our heat But the defect whereof seeing it includes a privation it cannot induce a positive Being such as a cold and moist distemperature and Dropsie should be 4. And likewise seeing they will have contraries to be contained under the same general kinde our vital heat which they will have to answer to the Element of the Stars cannot have an Elementary cold contrary unto it 5. A notable Flux of Blood doth of necessity cause cold And therefore if a cold distemperature arisen from a Flux of Blood should be of necessity the mother of the Dropsie at every notable flux of blood the Dropsie should of necessity be present But the consequent is false Therefore also the Antecedent 6. And moreover seeing cold from a flux of blood becomes universal there is no reason why the Abdomen should be rather loaden with water than the Breast whither to wit the Aire being continually breathed in doth increase the cold 7. If the Dropsie be the son of that distemperature in the Liver Whence therefore is there an uncessant thirst 8. If the Expulsion of water into the Abdomen be an action of a distempered Liver Why doth not the Liver use the same its own expulsive action while the Veines do swell with Urine they being intercepted by a destructive Stone 9. Likewise the Blood of Dropsical Persons even as also the Urine should be exceeding watery if the Dropsie should be from a cold distemperature of the Liver But the Urine should not be so reddish and Bloody 10. In the next place between a Dropsie and cold distemperature arisen from a flux of blood a positive cause being a third from a cold should of necessity interpose Which the Schooles do hitherto name because of a non-being there is no search made 11. Neither also do such distemperatures produce thirst together with a Salt Water in the Abdomen seeing they do not thirst who do plentifully detain a salt Urine throughout all their veins in the Stone which stops up the Reines on both sides 12. If the Dropsie be from a cold distemper Then a Dropsie should never be expected after a Fever or wringing of the Bowels if there be not a branded confusion of causes And in vain do they flee unto a cold distemperature for a Dropsie the which should equally proceed even from opposite causes 13. Every old and decrepite Person should now nourish the necessity of a Dropsie 14. A cold distemper seeing in its root it is like to Death extinguishment old Age and privation every Dropsie should contain a necessary despaire of health even as such a distemperature denies a restauration 15. If the Liver be the Liver and not the Lungs by reason of its Elementary co-tempering as the Schooles say and so from one only Seed all the Elements do proceed and wander hither and thither confused that they may be the constitutives of appointed Organs therefore the Liver receding from its natural temperature shall cease to be the Liver and shall be the Kidney Lungs or Milt 16. At leastwise a Member struck with a Palsey should not be wasted but should be after some sort swollen with a Dropsie 17. At length if the Venal Blood be resolved into four or again into three Humours from whence it is either naturally composed or they are in it being applyed unto or co-mixed in the subject of the Blood The Blood shall never be able to be changed into a Dropsical water Seeing this is not any Humour of the constitutives of the Blood Yet I have seen a country-man out of whom all the water was taken by a Borer in twelve hours space for he being become my Opposite Scoffed at me But the morrow morning being swollen with the former Lumpe of his Belly he died For the Dropsie increased not by degrees even as it had increased from its beginning but it presently hastened and proceeded unto an extream extension For I observed that his Flesh and Blood being melted into Water had made their retreat to the neather part of his Belly For in that one only day he had descended into extream Leannesse Therefore his Flesh and Blood shall now wander into an Hydropical or fifth Humour through the cold distemperature of his Liver I could perhaps pardon