The water of the ocean, being impregnated by the air, produces a twin birth; the _saline_ principle, which is masculine, soluble, acrid, transparent, and crystalline; the _earthy_, which is feminine, fixed, viscid, opaque, and attractive. It also nourishes the animal and the vegetable beings, which in course of time are reduced to earth. The _salts_, which are sapid, polyhedral, transparent, multiplicative, soluble into infinitely minute particles, although always retaining the same form, and again becoming concrete so as to form larger particles of the same figure, generate various minerals by crystallizing. _Nitrum_, which is aerial, by covering over increases _sand_. _Muria_, which is marine, by corroding attracts _clay_. _Natrum_, which is of animal origin, by deliquescing coagulates _lime_. _Alumen_, which is of vegetable origin, by ramifying produces _earthy soil_. These are the _Fathers_ of minerals. The _Earths_, which are powdery, drying, soluble, fixed, primitive, are generated or reproduced by crystallizing, precipitating, fermenting, or putrefying. From them, by crystallization or attraction, minerals are reformed, and these again are resolved into earths and regenerated. _Clay_ is the precipitation of the viscid water of the sea; and is opaque, plastic, friable, capable of hardening, and fireless. _Sand_ is the crystallization of turbid rain-water; and is transparent, juiceless, giving sparks, durable, and capable of being vitrified. _Mould_ is the decomposition of fermenting vegetables; and is black, bibulous, powdery, and combustible. _Lime_ is the decomposition of putrescent animal substances; and is whitish, absorbent, mealy, penetrable, and effervescent. Clay, the earth of sea-water, is hardened into _talc_, when redissolved is regenerated in the form of _asbestus_, and when more intimately dissolved resumes the form of _mica_. Sand, the earth of rain-water, when thrown on the land and dried, forms _drift-sand_, which finally becomes _gravel_. Both substances, when under ground, are converted into _sandstone_, and when mixed with other matters form _pebbles_, which grow into _stones_. When redissolved and crystallized, it produces _quartz_. _Mould_, the earth of vegetables, is hardened into fissile slate, which being impregnated with bitumen becomes _coal_. It is dissolved into _ochre_, and regenerated into _tophus_. Lime, the wife of natron, produces _marble_, dissolved and saturated with acid is crystallized into _gypsum_. Both are decomposed by the elements into _chalk_, which, acted upon by rain-water, becomes _flint_; and when dissolved, is crystallized into _spar_ (or _calcedony_). Such are the _Mothers_ of minerals.