CHAPTER XII.

Concerning Salt Nitre.
There is also another kind of salt which is called nitre, t It is composed naturally of the natural salt of animals' bodies, and the salt of nutriment in those bodies combined. One salt having thus been formed from two, the superfluity is decocted into urine, and, falling on the earth, is again decocted in due course. The two constituents are more and more closely united, so that from them results one single and perfect salt through the chemical separa- tion brought about by artificial decoction from its earth. It shews itself very clearly in the form of cones or of clods, provided it be thoroughly separated from the superfluous nutri mental Salt not yet digested by the animal decoction
• Every urine is a resolved salt.— Z?^ Judicio Urinarum ^ Lib. IL Salt passes into urine. — /?r Tartttro^ Lib.
I., Tract III., c. i, ex^sitio.
t Nitre forms in the pens and stables where cattle make water. For the earth whereon they make water is after- wards cooked and the salt nitre obtained from it. For all urine is salt. — De Tar.rtrv, Lib. L, Tract III., annotationes in c. 2. Nitre is excrement and the dead body of csile and nutrimental matter. And this dead body is thai out of
which putrefaction grows. — Fragmenta Medico^ Ue Tarato Nitreo. It is an essential spirit and excrement of all
salts, possessing a hermaphroditic nature. — De Pestiiiinte, Tract I.
The Economy of Minerals,
lOE
Vhea It is driven off into the urine* In Alchemy its use is ver}' frequent. It would be idle to recount how g-reat was the \Ho!ence which a first experiment demonstrated therein with disastrous result, when it was compounded with sulphur and formed into blastingf powder, whence it has been deservedly called terrestrial lightning. In the same way, from the salt of the liquor of the earth, which is an universal natural balsam, by which all things are built up in their special combinations, returning at length from this by resolution into the earth again— there is produced, as was stated above, a single salt, which afterwards percolating through the pores of the earth is coagulated in the form of cones of ice adhering to the rocks, from which circumstance it changed its name of Nitre into Saltpetre. Neither the one nor the other is particularly useful as an internal medicine, except in the way of reducing too obese bodies ; nor is it a \ety safe remedy, unless the two are mixed with Salt of Copper, or else the three are subjected to a process of extraction, and formed into one body for employment in this special way.