Beat your Copper ore to a fine powder, having first freed it as accurately as possible, by washing and roasting, from all stony, earthy, sulphureous, and arsenical parts. Mix your ore thus pulverized with thrice its weight of the black flux; put the mixture into a crucible; cover it with common salt to the thickness of half an inch, and press the whole down with your finger. With all this the crucible must be but half full. Set it in a melting furnace; kindle the fire by degrees, and raise it insensibly till you hear the Sea-salt crackle. When the decrepitation is over, make the crucible moderately red-hot for half a quarter of an hour. Then give a considerable degree of heat, exciting the fire with a pair of good perpetual bellows, so that the crucible may become very red-hot, and be perfectly ignited. Keep the fire up to this degree for about a quarter of an hour; then take out the crucible, and with a hammer strike a few blows on the floor whereon you set it. Break it when cold. If the operation hath been rightly and successfully performed, you will find at the bottom of the vessel a hard Regulus, of a bright yellow colour, and semi-malleable; and over it a scoria of a yellowish brown colour, hard and shining, from which you may separate the Regulus with a hammer. _OBSERVATIONS._ Copper in the ore is often blended with several other metallic substances, and with volatile minerals, such as Sulphur and Arsenic. Copper ores also frequently participate of the nature of the pyrites, containing a martial and an unmetallic earth, both of which are entirely refractory, and hinder the ore from melting. In this case you must add equal parts of a very fusile glass, a little borax, and four parts of the black flux, to facilitate the fusion. The black flux is moreover necessary to furnish the Copper with the Phlogiston it wants, or restore so much thereof as it may lose in melting. For the same reason, when any ore, but that of Gold or Silver, is to be smelted, it is a general rule to add some black flux, or other matter abounding with Phlogiston. The Regulus produced by this operation is not malleable, because it is not pure Copper, but a mixture of Copper with all the other metallic substances that were in the ore; except such as were separated from it by roasting, of which it contains but little. According to the nature of the metallic matters that remain combined with the Copper after this fusion, the colour of the Regulus is either like that of pure Copper, or a little more whitish: it is also frequently blackish, which has procured it the name of _Black Copper_. In this state, and even in general, it is usual enough to call this Regulus by the name of Black Copper, when alloyed with other metallic substances that render it unmalleable, whatever its colour be.