Page 394 - The Grotesque Children's Book

that nature her self does very seldom, if ever, make unions less dissoluble. for the fire
meeting with some bodies exceedingly and almost equally fixed, instead of making a
separation, makes an union so strict, that itself, alone, is unable to dissolve it; as we see,
when an alcalizate salt and the terrestrial residue of the ashes are incorporated with pure
sand, and by vitrification made one permanent body, (I mean the course or greenish sort
of glass) that mocks the greatest violence of the fire, which though able to marry the
ingredients of it, yet is not able to divorce them. I can show you some pieces of glass
which I saw flow down from an earthen crucible purposely exposed for a good while,
with silver in it, to a very vehement fire. and some that deal much in the fusion of metals
inform me, that the melting of a great part of a crucible into glass is no great wonder in
their furnaces. I remember, I have observed too in the melting of great quantities of iron
out of the ore, by the help of store of charcoal (for they affirm that sea-coal will not yield
a flame strong enough) that by the prodigious vehemence of the fire, excited by vast
bellows (made to play by great wheels turned about by water) part of the materials
exposed to it was, instead of being analyzed, colliquated, and turned into a dark, solid and
very ponderous glass, and that in such quantity, that in some places I have seen the very
highways, near such ironworks, mended with heaps of such lumps of glass, instead of
stones and gravel. And I have also observed, that some kind of firestone itself, having
been employed in furnaces wherein it was exposed to very strong and lasting fires, has
had all its fixed parts so wrought on by the fire, as to be perfectly vitrified, which I have
tried by forcing from it pretty large pieces of perfect and transparent glass. and lest you
might think that the questioned definition of heat may be demonstrated, by the definition
which is wont to be given and acquiesced in, of its contrary quality, cold, whose property
is taught to be tam homogenea, quam heterogenea congregare; give me leave to represent
to you, that neither is this definition unquestionable; for not to mention the exceptions,
which a logician, as such, may take at it, I consider that the union of heterogeneous
bodies which is supposed to be the genuine production of cold, is not performed by every
degree of cold. And accordingly if we expose a heap of money consisting of gold, silver
and copper coins, or any other bodies of differing natures, which are destitute of aqueous
moisture, capable of congelation, to never so intense a cold, we find not that these
differing bodies are at all thereby so much as compacted, much less united together; and
even in liquors themselves we find phenomena which induce us to question the definition
which we are examining.

Elevation. Raising something up.

Elixeration. The conversion of a substance into an elixir.

Evaporation. The removal of the watery part of a substance by gentle breezes, or being left a
long time alone in a church.

394