Animal matters yield in distillation, first, a phlegm, and then, on increasing the fire, a pretty clear oil, which gradually becomes thicker, blacker, more fetid, and empyreumatic. It is accompanied with a great deal of volatile alkali; and if the fire be raised and kept up till nothing more comes over, there will remain in the distilling vessel a coal like that of vegetables; except that when it is reduced to ashes, no fixed alkali, or at least very little, can be obtained from them, as from the ashes of vegetables. This arises from hence, that, as we said before, the saline principle in animals being more intimately united with the oil than it is in plants, and being consequently more attenuated and subtilized, is too volatile to enter into the combination of a fixed alkali; on the contrary, it is more disposed to join in forming a volatile alkali, which on this occasion does not rise till after the oil, and therefore must certainly be the production of the fire. It must be observed, that all we have hitherto said concerning the analysis of bodies must be understood of such matters only as have not undergone any sort of Fermentation. The chyle and milk of animals which feed on plants still retain some likeness to vegetables; because the principles of which these liquors are composed have not gone through all the changes which they must suffer before they enter into the animal combination. Urine and sweat are excrementitious aqueous liquors, loaded chiefly with the saline particles which are of no service towards the nourishment of the animal, but pass through its strainers without receiving any alteration; such as the neutral salts which have a fixed alkali for their basis, and particularly the sea-salt, which happens to be in the food of animals, whether it exist therein naturally, as it does in some plants, or whether the animals eat it to please their palates. The saliva, the pancreatic juice, and especially the bile, are saponaceous liquors, that is, they consist of saline and oily particles combined together: so that being themselves dissolved in an aqueous liquor, they are capable of dissolving likewise the oily parts, and of rendering them miscible with water. Lastly, the blood being the receptacle of all these liquors partakes of the nature of each, more or less in proportion to the quantity thereof which it contains. SECTION III. _The_ ANALYSIS _of_ MINERAL SUBSTANCES. Minerals differ greatly from vegetables, and from animals; they are not near so complex as those organized bodies, and their principles are much more simple; whence it follows, that these principles are much more closely connected, and that they cannot be separated without the help of fire; which not having on their parts the same action and the same power as on organized bodies, hath not the same ill effect on them; I mean the effect of changing their principles, or even destroying them entirely.