Page 393 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Ebullition. Excessive joy produced through excessive fermentation.

Edulceration. Removal of salts from the dinner table.

Elaboration. The general term for the process of separating impure elements from the pure.
That is to say: just as on Judgement Day our present invisible and internal souls will
manifest through our clarified bodies, that in this life are impure and dark, but the soul
will then be revealed and seen unto the outermost of the body, and will shine as the bright
sun, for elements are not so pure and elementary as they presume, and as their hypothesis
requires, and this may therefore be the more freely pressed upon the chemists, by way of
example, fire, which often divides bodies, upon the account that some of their parts are
more fixed, and some more volatile, how far either of these two may be from a pure
Elementary Nature is obvious enough, if Men would but heed it in the burning of wood,
for example, which the fire dissipates into smoke and ashes: for not only the latter of
these is confessedly made up of two such differing bodies as earth and salt; but the
former being condensed into that soot which adheres to our chimneys, discovers itself to
contain both salt and oil, and spirit and earth, (and some portion of chewy phlegm too)
which being, all almost, equally volatile to that degree of fire which forces them up, (the
more volatile parts helping perhaps, as well as the urgency of the fire, to carry up the
more fixed ones, as I have often tried in dulcified colcothar, sublimated by Sal Armoniac
blended with it) are carried up together, but may afterwards be separated by other degrees
of fire, whose orderly gradation allows the disparity of their volatileness to discover
itself. Besides, if differing bodies united into one mass be both sufficiently fixed, the fire
finding no parts volatile enough to be expelled or carried up, makes no separation at all;
as may appear by a mixture of colliquated silver and gold, whose component metals may
be easily severed by aqua fortis, or aqua regis (according to the predominancy of the
silver or the gold) but in the fire alone, though vehement, the metals remain unsevered,
the fire only dividing the body into smaller particles (whose littleness may be argued
from their fluidity) in which either the little nimble atoms of fire, or its brisk and
numberless strokes upon the vessels, hinder rest and continuity, without any sequestration
of elementary principles. Moreover, sometimes the bodies mingled by the fire are
differing enough as to fixidity and volatility, and yet are so combined by the first
operation of the fire, that itself does scarce afterwards separate them, but only pulverize
them; whereof an instance is afforded us by the common preparation of mercurius dulcis,
where the saline particles of the vitriol, sea salt, and sometimes niter, employed to make
the sublimate, do so unite themselves with the mercurial particles made use of, first to
make sublimate, and then to dulcify it, that the saline and metalline parts arise together in
many successive sublimations, as if they all made but one body. And sometimes too the
fire does not only not sever the differing elements of a body, but combine them so firmly,

393