To the extent possible under law, the Text Creation Partnership has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above, according to the terms of the CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). This waiver does not extend to any page images or other supplementary files associated with this work, which may be protected by copyright or other license restrictions. Please go to http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/ for more information.
A maturation of mines, that they may give more gold and silver in the fusion.
THis concerning the maturation of minerals, and metals is one of the most excellent of my secrets of the mending of metals. For I have often endeavored by a certaine secret way to fix metals and minerals, and I found that they might be in some part maturated, so as to leave gold and silver in the cuple, which before they could not leave, viz. before
they were maturated. Now I never had experience of the truth in a greater quantity, viz. of many pounds; and what the cause of this thing is, you may see in the beginning of these Annotations; it is needless therefore here to re∣peat it.
But this I must yet say, that this fixation is somewhat cost∣ly, which moreover cannot be done in any part of the world with gaine (although it may in a greater quantity, which yet I am ignorant of) for that fixation is done by the benefit of a certaine water, which also nature useth in the earth (which you cannot have in every place, where there is not good earth) And if you expect good by the water, the minerals, fix∣ation being made, must yeeld plenty of gold and silver, or else we labor in vaine. I often made tryals with a hundred pound weight of the lesser immature minerals, or semimetals, and I found in a hundred pound weight of cobolt a Mark and half of pure silver, and in bismuth 2. 3. 5. ounces of gold, Also lapis ca∣lam inari•• and Zinck (being digged in a due place) yeelded their gold abundantly. But oftentimes computation being made of the price of the mineral to be fixed, and of the matter fixing, and abstraction of this price being made from the price of the gold and silver produced from thence I found very little and sometimes no gaine at all, so that for the present I left the work, until I shall obtaine a water at a lesser price, or shall be able to maturate metals in a shorter time for the getting of a greater quantity of gold and silver, being that which ex∣perience will teach.
Although I never attaine to the fruitful perfection of this maturity, yet I would not have it be contemned, as being most profitable in other Chymical operations, and confirming me in my conceived opinion of perfecting metals by nature, and maturating imperfect minerals and metals (nothing with∣standing) as well by art, as by nature in the bowels of the earth, and in converting them into gold: of which thing more at large in my book of the generation of metals.