Sal Gemmæ.
Sal Gemmæ or Sal Fossile was the name given to rock salt, particularly to the transparent and the tinted varieties. It was believed to be more penetrating than the salt derived from sea water, and this property Lemery ascribed to the circumstance that it had never been dissolved in water, and therefore retained all its native keenness.
Spirit of Salt.
Spiritus Salis Marini Glauberi was one of the products discovered by Glauber, to whom we owe the name of spirit of salt. He was a keen observer and remarked on the suffocating vapour yielded as soon as oil of vitriol was poured on sea-salt. It is astonishing to his biographers that he just missed discovering chlorine. The spirit of salt was highly recommended for many medicinal uses; for exciting the appetite, correcting the bile, curing gangrene, and dissolving stone. Its remarkable property of assisting nitric acid to dissolve gold was soon observed and was attributed to its penetrating power.
Tartar.
Tartarus was the mythological hell where the gods imprisoned and punished those who had offended them. Virgil represents it as surrounded by three walls and the river Phlegethon, whose waters were sulphur and pitch. Its entrance was protected by a tower wrapped in a cloud three times as black as the darkest night, a gate which the gods themselves could not break, and guarded by Cerberus.
There is nothing to associate this dismal place with the tartar of chemistry, except that in old books it is said that Paracelsus so named the product because it “produces oil, water, tincture, and salt, which burn the patient as Tartarus does.” Paracelsus did not invent the name of tartar; it is found in many alchemical books long before his time. The earliest found use of it is in an alchemical work by Hortulcuus, an English alchemist of the eleventh century.
Paracelsus was writing about “tartarous diseases” (“De Morbis Tartareis”), those, that is, which resulted from the deposit of concretions. Stone, gravel, and gout were among these diseases of tartar, and evidently it was this morbid tartar which he associated with the legendary Tartarus. The word tartar, applied to the deposit from wine, is sometimes supposed to have descended from an Egyptian term, dardarot, meaning an eternal habitation, and etymologists generally prefer it as the origin of the name. If it was, the sense development of the term as applied to the chemical is not clear. The Greek word tartarizein, meaning to shiver with cold, does not help much in tracing the history of the word. Another frequently advocated derivation is the Arab, durd, dregs, sediment, which it is said was actually applied to the tartar of wine. It appears, too, that the Arabs used this term also as we do to represent the deposit on teeth; they also had a word, dirad, to mean a shedding of teeth, and by darda they signified a toothless old woman. Some etymologists consider, however, that the transition from durd to tartar would be most unlikely.
When the alchemists began to experiment with tartar their first process would be to distil it. The residue left in their retorts they called the salt of tartar. They knew this substance under other names, salt of wormwood, for instance, but they did not recognise the identity. By treating tartar with vinegar they produced acetate of potash, which they called regenerated tartar. Oswald Crollius, the compiler of the first European pharmacopœia, gave the name of vitriolated tartar to what we now know as sulphate of potash.
The iatro-chemists of the next century, who obtained it by various methods, gave to sulphate of potash distinct names which show in what esteem it was held. Among other designations it appears as Specificum purgans, Arcanum duplicatum, Nitrum fixum, Panacea holsatica, and Sel de duobus. Glaser, who produced it from sulphur, saltpetre, and urine distilled together, sold it as Sal Polychrest of Glaser.