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Updated: June 28, 2025
"And forasmuch as man is, and must be, the comprehensive end of all creatures, and the microcosm, he is counselled in the Revelation to buy gold that is thoroughly fired, or rather pure fire, that he may become rich and like the sun; as, on the contrary, he becomes poor, when he abuses the arsenical poison; so that, his silver, by the fire, must be calcined to a caput mortuum, which happens when he will hold and retain the menstruum, out of which he partly exists, for his own property, and doth not daily offer up the same in the fire of the sun, that the woman may be clothed with the sun, and become a sun, and thereby rule over the moon; that is to say, that he may get the moon under his feet.
In later times we find Flamsteed communicating to Newton, March 7, 1681, his opinion "that the substance of the sun is terrestrial matter, his light but the liquid menstruum encompassing him."
But a better Instance may be taken from Copper, for I have try'd, that if upon a Copper-plate you let some Drops of weak Aqua-fortis rest for a while, the Corpuscles of the Menstruum, joyning with those of the Metall, will produce a very sensible Asperity upon the Surface of the Plate, and will Concoagulate that way into very minute Grains of a Pale Blew Vitriol; whereas if upon another part of the same Plate you suffer a little strong Spirit of Urine to rest a competent time, you shall find the Asperated Surface adorn'd with a Deeper and Richer Blew.
The magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made up, the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated in the opaque sediment of history But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.
I dare say that this is not the view that M. Monnet takes of the subject, when he thinks to explain to himself the concretion of those different substances by means of water; but, according to my apprehension of the matter, his theory, when sifted to the bottom, will bear no other construction; and, unless he shall consider water like the matter of heat, as capable of producing the fluidity of fusion, and of being also again abstracted from the fluid, by pervading the most solid body, which would then be a substance different from water, he must employ this aqueous substance as a menstruum or solvent for solid bodies, in the same manner as has been done by those naturalists whom he he justly censure, and conform to those erroneous ideas which first observations, or inaccurate knowledge of minerals, may have suggested to former naturalists.
When we Dissolve in Aqua Fortis a mixture of Gold and Silver melted into one Lump, it usually happens that the Powder of Gold that falls to the bottom, as not being Dissoluble by that Menstruum, will not have its own Yellow, but appear of a Black Colour, though neither the Gold, nor the Silver, nor the Aqua Fortis did before manifest any Blackness.
If water had been the menstruum by which the consolidating matter was introduced into the interstices of strata, masses of those bodies could only be found consolidated with such substances as water is capable of dissolving; and these substances would be found only in such a state as the simple separation of the solvent water might produce.
Among the several changes of Colour, which Bodies acquire or disclose by Digestion, it it very remarkable, that Chymists find a Redness rather than any other Colour in most of the Tinctures they Draw, and ev'n in the more Gross Solutions they make of almost all Concretes, that abound either with Mineral or Vegetable Sulphur, though the Menstruum imploy'd about these Solutions or Tinctures be never so Limpid or Colourless.
And seeing, from the laminated structure of many formations and the organic remains contained in others, that they were sedimentary; he further inferred that these universal strata had been in succession precipitated from a chaotic menstruum which once covered our planet.
They in general suppose water to be the solvent of bodies, and the vehicle of petrifying substances; but they neither say whether water be an universal menstruum, nor do they show in what manner a solid body has been formed in the bowels of the earth, from that solution.
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