A Treatise of the Three Principles of Metals by John Rudolph Glauber

Description

A Treatise of the Three Principles of Metals is a book by John Rudolph Glauber, first published in the 17th century (its English appearance as part of Glauber’s collected works was printed in 1689). This concise treatise sets out the Paracelsian trio—salt, sulfur and mercury—as the fundamental principles operative in metals, and shows how those principles were understood and applied by a practitioner equally at home in alchemy and early chemical practice. Written by a man who bridged hands-on industrial chemistry and the older hermetic tradition, the work explains how the “three principles” manifest in metallic bodies, and discusses practical procedures and observations that link theoretical doctrine to laboratory practice. Though rooted in the language and aims of pre-modern chemistry, the treatise is also characteristic of Glauber’s pragmatic mindset: experiments, salts and acids are treated as tools for medicine, metallurgy and manufacturing as much as for gold-making. Readers today will find it useful both as a source for the history of alchemy and early chemical technique, and as an example of how seventeenth-century artisans and chemists began to translate mystical theory into repeatable, technical procedures.

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