Principles phlegm, water

Van Helmont s chemical experiments and his chemical theories exerted a powerful influence on the chemists of his century. No chemist is cited more frequently nor with higher respect. Yet, his theory of the two elements, air and water, did not, with many, replace the four Aristotelian elements, nor the three principles, though the latter had by this time been frequently elaborated into five, sulphur, mercury, salt (the active principles), and phlegm (water) and earth (the passive principles). The suggestion of the rational and desirable term gas which he used, was ignored by his early successors. Boyle, Boerhaave, and Priestley used instead the terms artificial air, factitious air, ... 

The water called Phlegm is the first of the passive principles it passes over in the distillation before the spirits when these are fixed, or after them when they are volatile. It never passes off pure and there always remains some impression of the active principles. This it is that causes it to have, ordinarily, more detersive power than is possessed by natural water. It serves to dilute the active principles and to moderate their agitation. 

Glaser also endorsed five first principles to which chemists reduced animal, vegetable, and mineral substances by fire. Mercury, sulphur, and salt were active principles water or phlegm and earth were passive. He made the relevance of these principles to the distillation products explicit ... 

The constituent character of sulphur was inflammability. There existed at least three kinds of sulphurs, however, manifestly differing in consistence, texture, or both oils, inflammable spirits, and consistent sulphurs such as common sulphur. The imprecision in terminology was just as evident here as in the case of spirits. What chemists normally called sulphur, or common sulphur, was a mineral body. The two qualities chemists attributed to phlegm or water were its appearing to them insipid, and its being of a volatile and fugitive nature. Earth seemed the most simple, elementary, and unchangeable principle it did not dissolve in water, did not affect the taste, and did not fly away from the body in combustion. ... 

Fire, the main instrument of chemical analysis, reduced natural objects into various matters and principles. The domain of accomplished analysis (A) will thus comprise those substances that were actually separated out by chemical analysis and constituted chemists laboratory reality. Fernery s and Homberg s chemical principles as the last point of analysis existed within this domain. A skilled chemist who knew how to regulate the intensity of fire for a desired outcome usually extracted some spirits, oils, aqueous liquors (phlegms and water), earths, and salts from a variety of natural bodies (mostly plants). All these distillation products could be dubbed chemical principles if they could not be decomposed further into simpler ones. They constituted, then, the domain of reality crafted in chemical practice. 

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