Mercury or Quick-silver in Latin, mercurius, argentum vivum, hydrargyrum . Mercury is a liquid metallic substance, of a bright white quality, resembling melted tin; Mercury is, after gold and platinum, the heaviest element in nature, a characteristic which does not prevent it from dissipating entirely when heated. Some authors place mercury among the metals, others see it as a half-metal, but the fluidity which characterizes it makes it appear to belong neither to the metals nor to the half-metals even though it has properties common to both. It seems then more natural to regard at it as a substance of a singular nature.

Mercury is found in two different states underground; where it is completely pure and in its characteristic liquid form it is called virgin mercury , because it has not been altered by heat during its extraction; or when it is found combined with sulfur it forms a more or less bright red substance, which is called cinnabar . Please refer to the article, which describes the different types of cinnabar and the manner in which one extracts the mercury from them; what remains here is to discuss virgin mercury and the manner in which it is found.

Of all the mercury mines known in Europe, there are none more remarkable than those of Idrija in the Carniola, which belongs to the House of Austria. These mines are located in a valley at the foot of high mountains, called by the Romains, the Julian Alps. They were discovered by accident in the year 1497. It is said that a worker who was making wooden vats, having wanted to see if a tub that he had just finished making would hold water, left it one night at the base of a flowing spring; having come back the next day and wanting to remove his vat, he found it so heavy that he could not budge it; having looked for the source of this heaviness, he noticed, under the water, a great quantity of mercury which he did not recognize; he took it to an apothecary who bought this mercury from him for a trifle and recommended that he return when he had more of the same substance: in the end, word of this discovery spread and reached the Austrian Archduke, who put himself in possession of these mines, from which the princes of this House have, up to the present made for themselves a very considerable income.

The mines of Idrija may be approximately nine hundred feet deep; one descends through vertical pits or shafts, as in all other mines; there is an infinite number of underground galleries, some of which are so low that one needs to bend down in order to pass and there are some spots where it is so hot, that to stop for even a short time makes one perspire abundantly. It is from these tunnels that one extracts the virgin mercury ; some of these rocks are so filled with it that, when one breaks them, mercury issues from them in the form of globules or drops. It is found also in a type of clay and sometimes one can see this mercury seep like rain or sweat across rocks which form the vaults of the tunnels and a man was often able to collect up to 36 pounds a day.

As for the mercury ore or rock that contains the virgin mercury , one breaks it with hammers and washes it, as well as the clay which is loaded with it; with regard to the rocks which only contain a small quantity of it, one crushes them under mortars and then washes them to remove the dirt and rock particles which are lighter and which no longer contain mercury; after which one transports this washed ore to a warehouse. Work in the tunnels is only done in winter, during which time workers amass a large stock of the ore and during the summer they process the ore in the manner described as “at the furnace”: here is how this operation was done in Mr. Keyssler’s time; workers mixed the ground or crushed ore with an equal quantity of quicklime and placed this mixture in iron retorts outfitted with earthenware receptacles at the end of their necks so as not to lose anything. They heated these retorts to a red-hot; and if a crack happened to form, they took care to fill it promptly with clay. Each furnace contained from 60 to 90 of these retorts, and there were normally 10 to 12 of these furnaces working; one started to heat them up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and continued until 2 o’clock in the afternoon; and at the end of the procedure, the retorts or condensers became a very bright red. After the distillation, the earthenware vessels contained, besides mercury , a dark substance resembling ash, from which one would remove still more mercury by washing it with water in wooden troughs placed on an incline; as long as this process produced mercury , it was repeated; and when it finally no longer gave off any mercury, it was distilled again with a new mixture of ore and lime. Since Mr. Keyssler’s day, the process has changed, and mercury is currently distilled in a furnace similar to that used by the Spaniards at Almaden and which is illustrated by the Metallurgy Plates, those indicating the processing of mercury . See Metallurgy Plates.

The workshops, where the mercury ore is distilled, are at some distance from Idrija; when at work there, the odor is very disagreeable; nothing grows in the area, the beasts do not want to eat the hay gathered there and the calves that the peasants raise do not become tall; the workers are relieved each month and their turns come only once a year. These workers, as well as those from the mercury mine, are subject to tremors and to compulsive nervous movements, especially those who collect the virgin mercury ; they are removed from the mine after fifteen days and are employed in the washing of ore that is done in open air, which restores their health. Some of these workers are so impregnated with mercury , that when they sweat, the mercury comes out of the pores of their skin; rubbing a piece of gold with their fingers, or putting it in their mouth, turns it white immediately.

In the workshops of Idrija, miners extract every day around 35 hundredweight of ore, which produces half its weight in mercury ; when output is strong, workers can produce up to 3000 hundredweight of distilled mercury annually and in the mines collect approximately 100 hundredweight of virgin mercury . One hundredweight of mercury sold in Mr. Keyssler’s time at the rate of 150 German florins wholesale and a pound of mercury sold at the rate of 2 florins retail, from which we can judge from this the value produced by these mines. It is a Dutch company that extracts the largest amount of mercury ; it mines 3000 hundredweight a year.

The mercury obtained by distillation is put in thick leather bags, each holding 150 pounds; and when it needs to be transported, two of these bags are placed in a barrel which is then filled with wheat bran.

These details were taken from Keyssler’s voyages, published in German; he witnessed firsthand all that he describes. This judicious author remarks that it is very rare to find cinnabar in the Idrija mines, and as the Alchemists believe mercury to be the origin and base of all the other metals, he observed that one finds no other metals in these mines; however this observation is not consistent with experience, and one finds cinnabar ore joined to ores of other metals.

Mercury mines are generally quite uncommon, but nothing is rarer than finding virgin mercury in the bowels of the earth: this mine in Idrija should therefore be looked upon as a great peculiarity; however it has already been many years since the discovery that the town of Montpellier in the Languedoc was constructed on a bed of clay containing virgin mercury . This discovery, which has attracted little attention until now, has been followed by Father Sauvage. This amateur scientist of natural history first suspected that it was by accident that mercury was found in this clay, that it was only by chance that it had been buried in wells and latrines; however the digging of a new cellar gave him the opportunity to correct his mistake, and he saw that this clay had never been disrupted, and should be considered a true virgin mercury mine, in which this substance formed small cylindrical branches which extended in different directions; and in crushing the clumps of this clay, he saw the mercury come out of it in the form of very shiny and very pure little globules. It is unfortunate that this mercury mine is located directly beneath the site on which the city of Montpellier is built, which prevents its exploitation: perhaps by digging in the surrounding area one would find the same bed of clay or loam in places where one could extract this mercury with greater ease; the stakes are sufficient to undertake research on this subject.

The most ordinary way to find mercury is in the form of cinnabar; it is found this way at Almaden in the Extremadura in Spain and at Huancavelicu in Peru. One also encounters mercury mines of cinnabar in Styria and in Hungary, but they are not appropriately exploited. A cinnabar mine was found at Saint-Lo in Normandy, but to date the production has not been substantial. There are also cinnabar mines in the principality of Hesse-Hamburg in Germany and in the Palatinate at Muchlandsberg, three leagues from Kreuzmach, where virgin mercury is also found.

The Alchemists and the partisans of the miraculous make much more of virgin mercury , that is, that which is found pure in the bowels of the earth, than of that extracted from ore with heat; but it is a prejudice that is not founded on any valid experience. It is certain that the best mercury one can employ for uses either of the Pharmacy or in Metallurgy is that which was extracted from cinnabar: it is the one that is called mercury revived from cinnabar .

Here are the properties of mercury in its pure form. 1) It has the shine and the weight of a metal, and it is, with the exception of gold and platinum, the heaviest element in nature. Its weight is to that of water like 14 is to 1. 2) Mercury bulges outward or has a convex surface; it differs from water and other liquids in that it does not wet fingers dipped into it. 3) On the one hand, it is the coldest element found in nature; on the other, it is capable of absorbing heat more quickly than all other fluids; but the degree of heat that boils water makes it dissipate and vaporize completely. 4) Even the strongest freeze does not condense mercury or render it at all solid. 5) Mercury has neither taste nor smell. 6) This substance is of an incredible divisibility; it splits itself into perfect spherical globules, and heat dissipates it into vapors which are nothing more than a mass of extremely small globules of mercury that has not been altered. 7) Mercury has the property to dissolve many metals and to unite intimately with them; this is called an amalgam. Mercury amalgamates by preference with gold, then silver, tin, and lead; it binds only with difficulty with copper and not at all with iron. It melds with bismuth and forms an amalgam with it; but the blending of an amalgam of bismuth with that of lead creates a very singular phenomenon, in that the combination of both amalgams becomes much more fluid than before, to the point where lead can pass with mercury through chamois cloth. 8) Mercury is dissolved by all acids, which is to say by sulfuric acid, nitric acid, acid from sea salt; it also dissolves in vinegar and in acids made from plants: but for that to happen its chemical structure must be altered. 9) It combines itself very easily with sulfur and forms through the action of heat and purification a red substance that is called cinnabar. See Cinnabar. 10) With simple trituration mercury combines with sulfur, which produces a black powder called ethiops mineral. 11) Mercury is heavier in winter than in the summer. Mr. Neumann observed that a vessel filled with mercury which weighed eleven ounces and seven grains in the summer, weighed eleven ounces and thirty-two grains in the winter. 12) Very pure mercury contains no water which it absorbs from the air; when placed in a test tube and shaken in darkness it produces a phosphoric or rather an electric light.

In the year 1760, during the month of January, Petersburg experienced a cold spell of excessive harshness: this situation allowed for a very important discovery about mercury : it could be changed into a solid mass by the extreme cold. To create this effect, the ball of a thermometer was dipped in a kind of gruel made of snow and the smoking spirit of nitre; in mixing this concoction with the thermometer itself the mercury froze and stopped at the 500 degree mark on Mr. de Lisle’s thermometer, which corresponds to 183 on Mr. de Reaumur’s. Mercury thus frozen weighs more than when fluid, furthermore it is ductile and malleable like lead. Crushed ice, it is said cannot freeze mercury which only reaches to 260 degrees on Mr. de Lisle’s thermometer. These experiments have not yet been verified in other European countries.

Mercury ’s propensity to bind with lead, tin, and bismuth and its high cost leads it be combined with these substances; it is then necessary to purify it before use. Mercury is ordinarily purified with vinegar and sea salt and denatured in this mixture: by this method the vinegar dissolves the metals with which the mercury is combined while it remains pure. But the surest way to purify the mercury is to combine it with sulfur and to put this mixture into sublimation in order to make cinnabar, which is then distilled to obtain mercury .

As to the manner of purifying mercury by filtering it through a chamois cloth, the end result is doubtful, because, as we have seen, bismuth makes tin and lead pass through the cloth with it; this manner of purifying mercury therefore is only to remove dust or grime that it acquired outside. Mercury adulterated with other metallic substances can be detected in that it does not form perfectly round globules; it runs more slowly and seems to form a kind of tail on the surface where it is poured.

Many physicians believed that mercury contained many air particles but this is an error; and Mr. Rouelle has found that these so-called air particles are actually water which can be removed by boiling; but mercury takes on water again very quickly if left exposed to the air, from which it easily absorbs humidity. Borrichius observed that a chain of polished iron rusted after standing for some time in mercury . Raimond Lulle is the first chemist to have reported that mercury contained water. One might surmise that it is the water found in mercury that gives it some of its dangerous effects and maybe from this comes its power to stimulate salivation and to attack the nervous system. It would be extremely advantageous to use only mercury from which absorbed water has been removed. The bad effects that mercury often has on the human body have made certain chemist suspect that it contains a foreign and arsenical matter they called nymph : and they claim to have removed it by combining mercury with mineral acids, which they then removed in order to introduce yet another substance: in this manner they achieved a perfectly pure mercury which they named animated mercury whose use is praised as much in Medicine as in the Chrysopee [Raymond Lulle’s alchemical treatise]; they claim that mercury dissolved gold if combined in equal quantities, but lost its properties once exposed to air. Further experiments will show up to what point these ideas are well founded. Beccher, Stalh and Henckel, the three most important chemists that Germany has ever produced, regard mercury not only as an arsenical substance, but also as a fluid arsenic .

The famous Mr. Neumann defines mercury as a mixture of water and matter, mixtum aqueo-terreum , a mixture which incorporates a part of the principle of inflammability, and which is loaded to excess with Beccher’s third matter, or mercurial matter, the principle to which metals owe their fusibility and their state of fluidity when heated. However accurate this definition, it is certain that the ease with which fire dissipates and evaporates mercury makes it impossible to break it down and to make an exact analysis of it. If it is heated in closed vessels, it expands and breaks the vessels. Mr. Rouelle found that this occurs because of the water absorbed by it since removing the water prevents explosions. If it is exposed to heat in open vessels , it is reduced to vapor or smoke: when exposed for a long period of time to a low flame, it transforms into a grey powder which, following Mr. Rouelle’s observations, was inopportunely identified as a clay, since in raising the heat, this powder very quickly returns to the form and brightness of mercury . To change mercury into this grey powder, it suffices to enclose it in a bottle that is shaken strongly and for a long time; this is what we call mercury self precipitated.

Despite the difficulty in understanding the nature of mercury , a large number of chemists regard it as the base for all other metals and they claim that one could extract mercury from them a process they named mercurification , but they assure that the mercury extract from metals is of a much more perfect nature than ordinary mercury . Beccher identifies in all the metals a principle which he names mercurial , to which their fusibility is due.

Several chemists have claimed to know the secret to stabilize mercury , this is to say to alter it so as to remove its fluidity and give it a more solid consistency like those of other metals; they have called this process mercury stabilization . Kunckel vouches that he has stabilized mercury into silver.

There are two types of mercury use: they may be distinguished as mechanical and pharmaceutical: one of the principal uses of mercury is in Metallurgy. In effect, because mercury binds with gold and silver, in countries where wood is scarce and where precious metals are found in abundance and pure or in combination with other elements, one need only crush a rock which contains them and triture it with mercury , which binds to gold and silver but not the stone which serves as the matrix or ore for these metals. When the mercury is laden with a sufficient quantity of gold or silver, the combination or amalgam created is distilled; in this way one separates the mercury and the gold or silver to which it was bound rests at the bottom of the vessels. Such is the method one follows for the processing of the gold and silver ore in almost all of America. See Gold.

In the Mint, one tritures using the same mercury technique the crucibles which served to melt the precious metals, as well as the dross resulting from the different processes in which there often remains some portion of the metal which one does not wish to lose. See Washing.

Mercury also serves to plate mirrors, made by amalgamating mercury with tin. See Mirrors. It also serves to gild silver, See Gilding . It is used to make barometers: it is part of the composition which makes up the metallic vegetation known as Diana’s Tree, etc. Mercury’s ability to kill many kinds of insects may be added to this list of properties.

If mercury is enclosed in a Philosopher’s Egg , that is to say in a retort in the shape of an egg and provided with a long neck; filled up to a third full with mercury , previously boiled to remove any absorbed water, hermetically sealed and on an even flame, capable of bringing the mercury to a boil and no further; this operation can be extended as long as desired without fear of explosion and the mercury will be converted into a red powder named persian mercury precipitate .

Dissolving mercury into nitric acid and making the dissolution evaporate and crystallize will create a neutral and very corrosive salt, with crystals resembling sword blades. If one evaporates the solution completely under a high flame, a red powder called red mercury precipitate is obtained. If stable alkali is gradually added to the mercury and nitric acid solution, and diluted with a good deal of water, a red powder or precipitate is also obtained. If instead of stable alkali, volatile alkali is used, the precipitate will be a slate grey rather than red. Mr. Rouelle dissolved the precipitate of mercury made with the stable alkali in vinegar acid, which produced a true neutral salt, which occurs because the structure of the mercury has broken down.

In order for sulfuric acid to dissolve mercury , it needs to be boiling and very concentrated, then mercury will effervesce as it dissolves; this operation is done in a reinforced retort with a receptacle. Following Mr. Rouelle, the subsequent distillation of the volatile sulfuric acid leaves a saline mass in the retort which dissolves in a large volume of water and produces a yellow powder which we call turbith or yellow precipitate .

If sea salt acid is poured into mercury dissolved in nitric acid, a white powder separates and falls to the bottom of the retort, which is what we call white mercury precipitate. Mr. Rouelle observes with reason that it is a true neutral salt, formed by combining sea salt acid and mercury , and that consequently it is very inappropriate to give it the name of precipitate . Furthermore, the acid of the sea salt does not act at all on the mercury unless it has been dissolved, that is to say, unless the structure of the mercury has broken down.

Sea salt combined with mercury which has been dissolved in spirit of nitre and purified is called corrosive sublimate, if the trituration of the corrosive sublimate is added to new mercury and again purified and if the trituration and purification is done three times, one obtains what is called soft mercury or aquila alba or mercurial panacea . If these processes are reiterated a number of times, one obtains what is called calomel .

The trituration of exactly one part mercury and two parts powdered sulfur creates a black powder named ethiops mineral .

The trituration and purification of a mixture of seven parts of mercury and four parts of sulfur will create artificial cinnabar ; however in order for it to be pure and have a nice color it will have to be purified again because at first a too-large portion of sulfur was added.

By mixing together a pound of pulverized cinnabar and five or six ounces of iron filings and by distilling this mixture in a retort adapted with a receptacle containing water, the mercury which was in the cinnabar will be obtained in its original form; this process is called the revivification of cinnabar .

Such are the principle preparations that Chemistry makes with mercury as much for the use of Medicine as for the Arts.