Green Vitriol retains much water in crystallizing; and, in order to free it from that superfluous phlegm, it must be calcined before you distil it. Without this precaution the operation will be exceedingly protracted, and a great deal of time wasted in distilling such a quantity of water; which will moreover greatly weaken the Acid by commixing with it, unless care be taken to change the recipient as soon as the water is all come over. But there is also another advantage in calcining the Vitriol before you put it into the retort: for otherwise this salt would melt on the first application of heat, and run into a mass; which would prove a great hindrance to its distillation. This inconvenience is avoided by a previous calcination, in consequence whereof the Vitriol is easily reduced to a powder which never becomes fluid. Vitriol calcined as directed in the process grows so hard, and adheres so firmly to the vessel in which the calcination is performed, that it requires no small pains to separate and pulverize it. Care must be taken to put it into the retort as soon as it is pulverized, and to stop that vessel very close if you do not begin the distillation immediately: for otherwise it will naturally attract from the air almost all the moisture it hath lost. The Acid which Vitriol yields by distillation is sulphureous; probably because it still retains some of the Phlogiston, with which it was united when under the form of sulphur in the Pyrites; or else hath laid hold on a portion of that belonging to the iron which served for its basis in Vitriol. But this sulphureous part is volatile, and flies off in time. This decomposition of Vitriol in close vessels is a difficult and laborious process. To carry the operation to its utmost perfection requires a fire of extreme violence, kept up without intermission during four or five days; such in short as few vessels are able to bear. Of course this operation is seldom performed in laboratories. The French Chymists fetch their Oil of Vitriol from Holland, where it is extracted from Vitriol in large quantities, by means of furnaces erected for the purpose, in which many retorts are employed at once. In the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences M. Hellot hath given us the most material circumstances of a very fine experiment of this kind, in which he pushed the distillation of Green Vitriol to the utmost. Into a German retort[5] he put six pounds of Green English Vitriol calcined to redness, which he exposed to a fire of the extremest violence, constantly kept up during four days and four nights. At the expiration of that time he found in the vessels employed as receivers an Icy Oil of Vitriol, which was altogether in a crystalline form and black. The precautions necessary to make this experiment succeed, he represents, in the following terms. [5] They are much the best, and bear a very fierce heat.