Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/559

Rh came under notice—mercury, or liquid silver—which corresponded still more nearly with the idea of the primary metallic matter, 'o author has informed us concerning the origin of the discovery of this singular metal. We only know that the Carthaginians were at that time working the mines of Betica, and that the minerals of mercury, situated in the same region, were well known and operated in the time of the Roman Empire. At any rate, the appearance and properties of this liquid and vaporizable silver, which was almost as refractory to chemical reagents as its ancient solid homonym, struck the imagination forcibly. It only seemed necessary to fix it—that is, to take away its liquidity and volatility—to obtain the other metals, particularly real silver. Mercury thus became the primary metal of the alchemists. A letter is extant from Synesius, a writer of the end of the fourth century, to Dioscorus, embodying a kind of catechism concerning the qualities and relations of this substance, from which we gather that, being the primary matter of metals, the first essential proceeding was to fix it or make it solid and stable as to fire, like other metals; then to color it, by the aid of some white or yellow tinctorial substance, such as sulphur or the sulphurets of arsenic, by which it would finally be changed into gold or silver. The name mercury had a variety of significations. It represented native mercury, extracted directly from the mines; artificial quicksilver, prepared from cinnabar, which was called copper mercury, lead mercury, or tin mercury, according as it was prepared in the cold by crushing cinnabar in a mortar with copper, lead, tin, etc., when the mercury produced appeared to participate in the qualities of the metal which had been used in its preparation. To us it is always the same mercury, rendered impure, indeed, by some trace of the precipitating metal; but in the eyes of the alchemists there were different metals. Furthermore, the term mercury was applied to two substances which we know were radically different: modern mercury, or mercury extracted from cinnabar, and metallic arsenic, which they called mercury extracted from orpiment. Both are, in fact, volatile and susceptible of sublimation, and both form red sublimates; both turn copper white, and both form red sulphurets. From these particulars we can see how broad was the meaning of the common word mercury, and how the mercury of the philosophers represented a kind of quintessence, common to these various kinds of mercury, or the primary matter of the metals, susceptible of being changed by coloring into gold or silver. The work to be done, then, was to extract this mercury from ordinary metals, and then color it to gold or silver; or to operate on its substance as it was contained in the copper, lead, tin, and iron, so as to eliminate the contrary qualities and perfect the conformable