Spirits saline

SAVOUR — That sensation which Sulphureous, Mercurial, and Saline Spirits occasion in the organs of taste. The varieties of Salt in themselves possess no savour, and their sharp or acrid nature is to be attributed to the igneous quality which is communicated to them by a Volatile and Mercurial Sulphur which is invariably combined with them, and is exceedingly difficult to separate. The different savours must be entirely attributed to the proportion in which the said Sulphur combines with the Salts it is bitter, sweet, or acid, in strict correspondence with this proportion the more penetrating the savour the greater is the quantity of Mercurial Sulphur. 

In Sennert s day, the three strong acids, sulfuric, hydrochloric, and nitric, were all derived by distillation from substances that were acknowledged to be saline, such as iron sulfete, table salt, and saltpeter. Hence he refers to them as saline spirits. ... 

Lemery utilizes the five principles very little in the body of the text. The mercurial spirit, which was presented so prominently in the first section, never comes up for discussion in the text, nor does water as a principle. Salt is used as a generic material term, referring to all those bodies soluble in water and conveying a saline taste. Chief among these are the acid salts, derived from the First Principle as a universal acid liquor that percolates through the earth and, by long fermentation and concoction,... 

Pierre-Joseph Macquers Elemens de chimie th orique, (1749) and Elemens de chimie practique (1751) became the first significant French successor to Nicholas Lemerys Cours de chymie, first published in 1675. Unlike earlier works it was an attempt to offer chemistry for its own sake, independent of medicine. It was intended for the absolute Novice in Chymistry to lead him from the most simple truths. .. to the most complex. Hence he begins with the elements, then moves on to saline substances (acids, alkalies, and their combinations) the volatile sulphureous spirit, sulphur, phosphorus, and the neutral salts, which have an earth or a fixed alkali for their bases. Then on to the metals, which are scarcely more compounded than the saline ... 

Geoffroy insisted that the same theory could explain another process of making corrosive sublimate by a solution method One poured the solution of marine salt in water over the solution of quicksilver in spirit of niter. The white precipitate resulting from the mixture was sublimated to a white saline compact mass which was corrosive sublimate. 

EDULCERATE — To Wash a Saline Substance, until all the salt has been removed. This term, understood in its vulgar sense, also signifies moderation of the acidity and corrosive quality of salts, spirit, or other substances. Raymond Lully employs it more than once to express, or symbolize, the coction or digestion of the Mercury of the Philosophers to the point of fixation. 

I took four drachms (gros) of vitriolated tartar reduced to a fine powder, mixed it with three drachma of very pure fuming spirit of nitre. A considerable effervescence was at once excited, accompanied by heat and very red vapours of nitrous acid. The mixture became pasty. I diluted it with a sufficient quantity of water to dissolve the saline mass and 1 set the liquid to crystallise. The salt which 1 obtained proved to be very piire nitre, crystallised partly in needles and partly in small cubic crystals. 

Georg Eimbke (Hamburg, 17 December 1771-Eppendorf, nr. Hamburg, 20 April 1843), assistant in the University of Kiel, inspector of salines in Holstein (1797—1806), and apothecary in Hamburg, also published on adipocire (see p. 547), a filtering apparatus, a multiple-wick spirit lamp and a compressing pump. He published a comparative nomenclature. ... 

The works of Boyle, Mayow, and Willis (especially those that the latter published after 1664) show that numerous physiologists dispensed with the notion of spirit as factotum and were inclined rather to carry out a chemical analysis of the spirit contained in blood, so as to discover its composition and properties. One of the consequences of these researches was that the notion of vital spirits as a distinct and homogeneous substance was discredited by the end of the seventeenth century and was generally abandoned in early eighteenth-century medicine. The standard functions of vital spirits were conceived as the outcome of chemical reactions occurring in blood, involving saline and sulphurous particles. 

Following van Helmont, Thomson criticised Willis s theory of five principles and his notion of vital spirits as composed mainly of spirit and sulphur. See Aimatiasis (n. 76), pp. 30-33. Thomson, Aimatiasis (n. 76), pp. 148-49. The saline nature of vital spirit was also a central theme in the work of George Acton, who, like Thomson, was a follower of van Helmont. Whereas Thomson insisted upon the divine illumination of vital spirit as the source of life, Acton simply stated that the volatile salt contained in the blood was the balsome of life, and preserver of the whole body from corruption. G. Acton, Physical Reflections upon a letter written by J. Denis (London, 1668), p. 9. 

Thus Mans blood if putrified yelds an urinous spirit first, y " black oyle, y " flegme, fixed salt in y Caput Mortuum but if it been fresh y serum must be thrown away or else it will rise before y spirit. Mans Urin if fresh or put upon calx viva yelds its spirit last and if putrifyed, first. Urinous salt or volatile salts of animall substances (Boyle calls y Salsuginous or Saline) As Spirit of Hartshorne of Urine of Blood. . . (Ibid, fols 5 - ). 

---