[359] Bacon does not name the two substances he alludes to, but Whitehome names two and prescribes the same proportions: “Two parts of unslacked lime and three of oke asshes.”—See A, p. 21. Did Whitehorne have access to Bacon’s MSS.?
[360] Treating ostensibly on gold, Bacon is obliged to use resolve for dissolve.
[361] The alchemical preparation of gold had much in common with the refining of saltpetre. In the “Nitri Preparatio” of Bernard’s and Penoti’s Theatrum Chemicum, iii. 78, we read: “Fac postmodum de eo per omnia ut dicam in preparatione auri, id est, destilla per alambicum et congela,” &c.
[362] i.e. to the laxative.
[363] A verbum œnigmaticum. The Phœnix is a singular animal, as Bacon justly observes, inasmuch as it springs from its own ashes. Its name, therefore, may be figuratively used with perfect propriety to denote animal charcoal, an efficacious agent in clarifying solutions of impure saltpetre.—Bloxam’s “Chemistry,” 8th ed., p. 488.
[364] Bacon appears to have poured the hot solution upon the laxative, precisely as Clarke directs in his “Natural History of Nitre,” London, 1670, p. 42: “Pour the hot liquid on ashes ... ’tis no matter how soon you let it run off the ashes again.”
[365] i.e. the removal of the insoluble impurities.
[366] “Then pour it into the other jar.”—Hassan, A, p. 24.
[367] i.e. into a crystallising jar.
[368] “The solution is kept in constant agitation by poles while cooling.”—Waltham Abbey Regs., H, p. 20.