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The same thing works very well with sulfur, when certainly two parts, or better, three parts of alkali salt and one of pulverized sulfur are successively poured into and fused in a crucible. There is formed liver of sulfur. This, in the space of a quarter of an hour more or less, by fire alone, without any addition, can be converted to such a salt as is obtained from oil of sulfur per campanum and salt of tartar, that which is commonly called vitriolated tartar. There is no more trace of sulfur or alkali salt, and in place of the red color of the liver, this salt is most white; in place of the very evil taste of the liver, this salt is very bitter; in place of the easy solution, nay, the spontaneous deliquescence of the liver, by reason of its alkali salt, this salt is the most difficult of all salts except tartar of wine to be dissolved; in place of the impossibility of crystallizing the liver, this is very prone to form almost octahedral crystals; in place of the fusibility of the liver, this is devoid of all fusion.
If this new salt, from the acid of sulfur and alkaline salt formed as stated above when the phlogiston has been used up, is treated with charcoal, in the space of a quarter of an hour the original liver of sulfur reappears, and this can be so converted a hundred times ... .
I can indeed show by various other experiments how phlogiston from fatty substances and charcoal enters very promptly into metals themselves and regenerates them from the burned calx into their own fusible, malleable, and amalgamable state.
Translated by Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein
Reading and Discussion Question
1.In his The Book of the Remedy (c. 1021), we saw Ibn Sina (Avicenna) working with Islamic Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt theory—a set of ideas that we have also seen picked up, for example, in Paracelsus’ Of the Nature of Things (1537) and in Robert Boyle’s Excellency and Grounds of the Corpuscular or Mechanical Philosophy (1674). What ontology of matter does Stahl seem to be working with in 1697, and what kinds of experimental practices and techniques is he using?