If then these profound Contemplators of nature, and her effects, had been willing to accompany their Imaginary discourses, with experience that reveales infinite secrets by fire, they could never have fallen into such absurdities: and had manifestly seen without any vail or obstacle all full of things whereof they remaine in irresolution and doubt not having spoken therein but as blind men and by guesse, for we cannot discover the secrets of things to proceed therein directly, nor come to it by entring on it, after the manner of speech, by the foregate: for nature goeth in her workes rarely and in secret, as by the posterne gate: or by setting ladders against the windowes: The _Greeks_ call that διάλυσις, solution; No man can know the composition of a thing, said _Geber_ very well, that was ignorant of its destruction. And this is done by fire, which separates the parts, as hath been said before. There are then two divers substances of salt, therefore it causeth divers effects, the one is sweet, glutinous and inflamable, of the nature of aire, nourishing, binding. The other sharp, mordicant and separative that begets nothing. The Poets in their mythologies have called this the _Ocean_, and the sweet wherewith the pickle of the Sea is moistened and made liquid _Tethys_ as _Plutarch_ hath it in his _Osiris_ which giveth milk to and nourisheth all things. But simple water of it selfe alone would not be sufficient to nourish, if it were not assisted with things fastened to the earth, the salt therein inclosed and therewith mingled, having a sweet and glutinous unctuosity, for as in the Sea-water there are two substances, sweet and salt, there are subalternately two in salt: But we cannot say that they doe nourish or produce any thing. Therefore is it, that they use to raze Traiters-houses, and sow them with salt as reputed unworthy to produce anymore. Salt indeed produceth nothing as it is, where its sweet substance is so drowned with the salt, that it cannot expresse it selfe in action, so as it is, except it be freed out of prison, for the saltnesse predominates over it, and covers it. But for replication thereunto which was said before, that fresh water alone, doth neither nourish nor produce any thing: which we see to the contrary, by experience in many waterish herbs that grow in the midst of waters, and in flints that it engenders shells, and fishes, and wormes: to be short, that its procreation doth extend to the three composed kinds of Minerals, Vegetables, & Animals: And indeed put little pebbles in a phial, and water thereon, every day, renewing it daily, at the end of certaine time, you will find them so great, and so bigge, that they cannot come out at the neck by which they were put in. But indeed all this proceeds from the slime, which is mingled with the water, as frogs, and other things, which are procreated in the middle Region of the aire of the slime which the Sun beams hath thence raised with the