Titles: Notes.
Salt Tartar in this operation takes action like quicklime in the other; but since it is a more powerful alkali 
than quicklime, it doesn’t need to be added in the same quantity. It can be substituted by the salt nitre fixed by coals, or an other salt alkali.
When fire begins to heat the matter, a large quantity of volatile salts raise to the hat, in a very nice crystal shape, but the overcoming humidity gets them back to spirits.
The flowers come from a certain quantity of salt armoniac, not enough penetrated by the salt tartar. The febrifuge salt is nothing more than a mixture of salt tartar and the fixed and acid part of salt armoniac, it pushes through urine and scarcely through sweat, its being fixed causes it to precipitate more easily than it rarefies; it is for this reason that it removes obstructions, which are often the first cause of fevers.
Title: Acid Spirit of Salt Armoniac.
Take the quantity you like of the fixed febrifuge salt we have already talked about. Reduce it in powder and mix it exactly with three same quantities of Bole powder (2). Put the mixture in a horn whose third is wide. Place it in a closed reverberation oven and fit a great bal or recipient on it. Close joints with lute and go as we have said about preparing the spirit of salt. You will find into the recipient an acid spirit which is a very good diuretic, specifically for pernicious diseases and dosage is a pleasant acidity inside juleps or soups.
Title: Notes.
This acid spirit comes from the fixed salt armoniac, since the alkali does not provide any drop of it. Somebody state it can dissolve gold, but I never experienced that, in spite of my having put inside a gold very untied. The gold having been remained two or three days was then removed as undivided as before.”
Lemery fails here to say that a single salt volatilization has never produced our Mercurius/Universal Dissolvent/Alcahest, in fact alchemists used to repeat operations over and over to extract our Secret Fire from Materia Tertia or salts. Was Lemery really so uneducated or wanted to give us a hint saving the secret?
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- See also Starkey & Volatilization of Alkalis;
- For a bole definition see site dictionary or Martino Poli & the Analysis of Saltpeter ;