Essence of Lead

In the Mysterious and Yellow, the Yin and Yang principles in their pure state are represented by the essences of lead and mercury, which are liberated by the adept when he heats the native substances. Then lead and mercury are repeatedly steamed in a bamboo cylinder, and finally are sublimated with aqueous solutions of realgar and cinnabar. Details on the last stage of the process, called the hundred steamings (baizheng), are found in the Secret Instructions on the Nine Elixirs. The Mysterious and Yellow is first... 

Fire is called Child-Light ziming), and mercury too is called Child-Light. The One yi) is the Essence of Lead (qianjing) some call it Great Yin (taiyin), others Duke Metal (jingong), others River Chariot (heche), others the Handsome Maiden (chanii), and others quickly conquered stone lizhi shi). 

The Perfected say that the Essence of Cinnabar (dansha jing) should be transmuted into the Liquid Pearl (liuzhu) and into Frost and Snow (shuang-xue), and that the Essence of Lead (qianjing) should be transmuted into a Reverted Elixir and into the Yellow and White (huangbai). 

Liquid Pearl here is a synonym for mercury obtained by refining cinnabar see Shiyao erya, i.ib. The terms Frost and Snow too are part of several secret names for refined mercury. Yellow and White usually denotes gold and silver, and the reason for its mention in relation to the Essence of Lead is unclear to me. In a description of the method for making the Mysterious and Yellow, the Jiudan jingjue, 12.1b, has White Snow (baixue) instead of Yellow and White this reading may be preferable. 

This is the essence of leading indicators They tell you where performance is likely to go. 

The widely observed lack of precise correlations among properties that chemical experience leads us to believe are somehow related to polarity has two important meanings First, it tells us that no single property may be taken as a generally applicable measure of polarity. Second, it conveys the message that some combination of the properties may capture the essence of what we mean by polarity. 

In spite of the progress described above, certain fundamental problems in flow and heat transfer are still unclear. This leads to difficulties in understanding the essence of micro-thermohydrodynamic phenomena. 

In Spite of the existence of numerous experimental and theoretical investigations, a number of principal problems related to micro-fluid hydrodynamics are not well-studied. There are contradictory data on the drag in micro-channels, transition from laminar to turbulent flow, etc. That leads to difficulties in understanding the essence of this phenomenon and is a basis for questionable discoveries of special microeffects (Duncan and Peterson 1994 Ho and Tai 1998 Plam 2000 Herwig 2000 Herwig and Hausner 2003 Gad-el-Hak 2003). The latter were revealed by comparison of experimental data with predictions of a conventional theory based on the Navier-Stokes equations. The discrepancy between these data was interpreted as a display of new effects of flow in micro-channels. It should be noted that actual conditions of several experiments were often not identical to conditions that were used in the theoretical models. For this reason, the analysis of sources of disparity between the theory and experiment is of significance. 

To further clarify what mentoring is, attention is drawn to a very good analogy for understanding the essence of mentoring practice today, written by Steve Torjussen (1999), a leading consultant, professional trainer and speaker on success strategies. He wrote as follows ... 

Straggling. The essence of RBS is to measure the energy of the scattered beam and to calculate thereby the depth and/or mass from which scattering occurs. Any uncertainty in particle energy leads to a reduction in the precision with which mass and depth analysis can be achieved. 

A fundamental goal of chemical research has always been to understand the reaction mechanisms leading to specific reaction products. Reaction mechanisms, in turn, are a consequence of the structural dynamics of molecules participating in the chemical process, with atomic motions occurring on the ultrafast timescale of femtoseconds (10 s) and picoseconds (10" s). Although kinetic studies often allow reaction mechanisms as well as the kind and properties of reaction intermediates to be determined, the obtained information is not sufficient to deduce the ultrafast molecular dynamics. Because these ultrafast motions are the essence of every chemical process, detailed knowledge about their nature is of fundamental importance. 

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