Spiritus Salis Marini Glauberi was one of the products discovered by Glauber, to whom we owe the name of spirit of salt. He was a keen observer and remarked on the suffocating vapour yielded as soon as oil of vitriol was poured on sea-salt. It is astonishing to his biographers that he just missed discovering chlorine. The spirit of salt was highly recommended for many medicinal uses; for exciting the appetite, correcting the bile, curing gangrene, and dissolving stone. Its remarkable property of assisting nitric acid to dissolve gold was soon observed and was attributed to its penetrating power. TARTAR. Tartarus was the mythological hell where the gods imprisoned and punished those who had offended them. Virgil represents it as surrounded by three walls and the river Phlegethon, whose waters were sulphur and pitch. Its entrance was protected by a tower wrapped in a cloud three times as black as the darkest night, a gate which the gods themselves could not break, and guarded by Cerberus. There is nothing to associate this dismal place with the tartar of chemistry, except that in old books it is said that Paracelsus so named the product because it “produces oil, water, tincture, and salt, which burn the patient as Tartarus does.” Paracelsus did not invent the name of tartar; it is found in many alchemical books long before his time. The earliest found use of it is in an alchemical work by Hortulcuus, an English alchemist of the eleventh century. Paracelsus was writing about “tartarous diseases” (“De Morbis Tartareis”), those, that is, which resulted from the deposit of concretions. Stone, gravel, and gout were among these diseases of tartar, and evidently it was this morbid tartar which he associated with the legendary Tartarus. The word tartar, applied to the deposit from wine, is sometimes supposed to have descended from an Egyptian term, dardarot, meaning an eternal habitation, and etymologists generally prefer it as the origin of the name. If it was, the sense development of the term as applied to the chemical is not clear. The Greek word _tartarizein_, meaning to shiver with cold, does not help much in tracing the history of the word. Another frequently advocated derivation is the Arab, _durd_, dregs, sediment, which it is said was actually applied to the tartar of wine. It appears, too, that the Arabs used this term also as we do to represent the deposit on teeth; they also had a word, _dirad_, to mean a shedding of teeth, and by _darda_ they signified a toothless old woman. Some etymologists consider, however, that the transition from durd to tartar would be most unlikely.