steel, for if common mercury touches a steel rod, or if the rod be anointed with mercurial oil, it can afterwards be broken like glass and cut off. This is indeed a great secret and must be kept strictly occult. In the same way, too, the magnet should be guarded and kept from Mercury, for it exerts hostility on it as on Mars. For every magnet which common mercury touches, or which is anointed with mercurial oil, or only placed in Mercury, never afterwards attracts iron.[1] Let no one be surprised at this; there is a natural cause for it, seeing that Mercury extracts the spirit of iron which the magnet holds latent in itself. Wherefore also the spirit of iron in the magnet attracts the body of Mars to itself; and this happens not only in the magnet but in all other natural things, so that the foreign spirit which is in an alien body, which is not of its own nature, always attracts a body agreeing with its own nature. This should be known not only of the magnet, but of all natural bodies, such as minerals, stones, herbs, roots, men, and animals.
After this it should be known that metals exercise hostility amongst each other, and mutually hate one another from their inborn nature; as you see in the case of Saturn, which is the principal enemy of Sol, from its congenital nature. It breaks up all the members of gold, renders it deformed, weak, and destroys and corrupts it even to the death, more than it does any other metal. It also hates tin, and is an enemy of all the metals, for it renders them degenerate, unmalleable, hard and unfit, if it be mixed with either of them in fire or flux.
Since, therefore, you have now heard about the enemies of the metals, learn, moreover, about their preservation and conservation, which guard the metals from all loss and corruption, and, in addition, strengthen them in their nature and virtue, while they graduate them more highly in colour. First, then, it ought to be known concerning gold that it cannot be better and more beautifully preserved than in boys' urine, in which has been dissolved sal ammoniac, or in the water of sal ammoniac alone. In these, with time, it acquires such a high grade of colour as cannot be surpassed. Silver cannot be better preserved and conserved than if it be boiled in common water or acetum in which have been dissolved tartar and salt. In this way any old silver, though blackened and stained, is renewed, if it is boiled thus. Of iron and steel the best and most useful conservative and preservative is fresh, not salted, lard from a gelded sow. This protects all iron and steel from rust if they are anointed therewith once every month. In like manner, if iron be liquefied with fixed arsenic, and occasionally reduced to a flux, it can be so renewed and fixed that, like silver, it never rusts. Copper can be conserved and preserved if only it be mixed with sublimated Mercury, or anointed with oil of salt, so
- ↑ So, also, it is affirmed that if the magnet be steeped in garlic it will he deprived of its attractive virtue.—De Morbis Amentium, c. 5. Should anyone make use of a magnet while he is wearing a sapphire, it will effect nothing till the gem be removed. The same quality seems to reside in carabe, coagulate of gum, resin, and therebotin.—De Peste Lib. II., c. 2.
