The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle.

  • Boyle, Robert, 1627-1691.
Date:
[between 1900 and 1999]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sceptical chymist / by the Hon. Robert Boyle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    106/264 (page 78)
    milk of the nurse; and that white liquor is generally by physitians supposed to be but blanched and altered blood. And I remember I have observed, not farr from the Alps, that at a certain time of the yeare the butter of that country was very offensive to strangers, by reason ■of the rank taste of a certain herb, whereon the cows were then wont plentifully to feed. But (proceeds Carneades) to give you instances of another kind, to shew that things may be obtained by the fire from a mixt body that were not pre-existent in it, let me remind you, that from many vegetables there may without any addition be obtained glass, a body, which I presume you will not say was pre- existent in it, but produced by the fire. To which I shall add but this one example more, namely that by a certain artificial way of handling quicksilver, you may without addition separate from it at least a 5th or 4th part of clear liquor, which with an ordinary peripatetick would pass for water, and which a vulgar chymist would not scruple to call phlegme, and which, for ought I have yet seen or heard, is not reducible into mercury again, and conse- quently is more than a disguise of it. Now besides that divers chymists will not allow mercury to have any, or at least any considerable quantity of either of the ignoble ingredients, earth and water; besides this, I say, the great ponderousness of quicksilver makes it very unlikely that it can have so much water in it as may be thus obtained from it, since mercury weighs 12 or 14 times as much as water of the same bulk. Nay for a further confirmation of this argument, I will add this strange relation, that two friends of mine, the one a physitian, and the other a mathematician, and both of them persons of unsuspected credit, have solemnly assured me, that after many tryals they made, to reduce mercury into water, in order to •a philosophicall work, upon gold (which yet, by the way, I know proved unsuccessfull) they did once by divers cohobations reduce a pound of quicksilver into almost a pound of water, and this without the addition of any other substance, but only by pressing the mercury by a skilfully managed fire in purposely contrived vessels. But of these experiments our friend (saies Carneades,