essary first to add a history of iron and to indicate the
hitherto unknown forces of iron, before this our discourse goes on to the
explanation of magnetick difficulties and demonstrations, and to deal with
the coitions and harmonies of loadstone with iron. Iron is by all reckoned
in the class of metals, and is a metal livid in colour, very hard, glows
red-hot before it melts, being most difficult of fusion, is beaten out
under the hammer, and is very resonant. Chemists say that if a bed of fixed
earthy sulphur be combined with fixed earthy quicksilver, and the two
together are neither pure white but of a livid whiteness, if the sulphur
prevail, iron is formed. For these stern masters of metals who by many
inventions twisting them about, pound, calcine, dissolve, sublime, and
precipitate, decide that this metal, both on account of the earthy sulphur
and of the earthy mercury, is more truly a son of the earth than any other;
they do not even think gold or silver, lead, tin, or copper itself so
earthy; for that reason it is not smelted except in the hottest furnaces,
with bellows; and when thus fused, on having again grown hard it is not
melted again without heavy labour; but its slag with the utmost difficulty.
It is the hardest of metals, subduing and breaking all things, by reason of
the strong concretion of the more earthy matter. Wherefore we shall better
understand what iron is, when we shall declare what are the causes and
substance of metals, in a different way from those who before our time have
considered them. Aristotle takes the material of the metals to be vapour.
The chemists in chorus pronounce their actual elements to be sulphur and
quicksilver. Gilgil Mauritanus gives it as ashes moistened with water.
Georgius Agricola makes it out to be water and earth mixed; nor, to be
sure, is there any difference between his opinion and the position taken by
Mauritanus. But ours is that metals arise and effloresce at the summits of
the earth's globe, being distinguished each by its own form, like some of
the other substances dug out of it, and all bodies around us. The earth's
globe does not consist of ashes or inert dust. Nor is fresh water an
element, but a more simple consistency of evaporated fluids of the earth.
Unctuous bodies, fresh water devoid of properties, quicksilver and sulphur,
none of these are principia of metals: these latter, {20} things are the
results of a different nature, they are neither constant no