Its weight remains one and the same. God has gifted His elements with this peculiarity, that they should give fruits and consume their superfluities, but whither those superfluities have gone no man knows, any more than he knows whither yesterday has gone. In like manner, the element of water is its own death, inasmuch as it consumes and mortifies its own fruits. That death is in the great centre and terminus of water, the open sea, into which all water flows. Whatever passes hereinto dies and decays, passing away even as wood is consumed in the fire. And as, year by year, new fruits emerge from the earth, while the old ones perish, so, every day new minerals are begotten, be they metals, marcasites, gems, stones, salts, or springs. These all come forth girt about with death, as an infant who brings along with it death bound up with life. By the same method of reasoning, metals, too, bring with their own beginning their own death too, and they die in the terminus of the water, that is, in the open sea. The Rhine, the Danube, the Elbe, and other rivers are not the element itself; they are its fruits. The element is in the open sea. It is that out of which all grow and into which all must perforce return, and thus they acquire death whence life is allotted to them. This death will be more fully described hereafter in distinct paragraphs, when it is pointed out separately how each mineral comes into being and dies.
Now, with regard to the tree of the element of water, mark this. When Nature is about to put forth any growth into the world—be it gold, silver, copper; be it gem, emerald, sapphire, granate; be it a spring, sweet or brackish, warm or cold; be it coral or marcasite—she then raises up, from the element of water, a tree on the earth, so that its root is fixed in the centre of the sea (or of the matrix). That tree sends forth its seed into the earth, and spreads forth its branches. Know, therefore, that its stock has the form of a liquid, which is not water, oil, bitumen, or mucilage. It has the appearance of wood produced from the earth, but still it is not wood, nor seed (or stock) and yet it is of the earth, and each has its own body. That liquid is the stock, and its branches are that same liquid, just as a tree is wood, and its branches are like in kind. So, then, the mineral tree is formed into a body of this kind, and afterwards divided into its ramifications, so that one branch very often extends from another into a second or third, running out and separately extending itself to a space of twenty, forty, or sixty miles. One branch turns to the German Alps, another to Lungia, another to the Valley of Joachim, and another to Transylvania. Such is its distribution throughout the whole world. In this way innumerable trees are interwoven, wherever the earth extends. As trees grow forth in this fashion, one after another on all sides, their extremities extend to the uttermost parts of the earth. Sometimes they crop up to the surface of plains under the open sky; sometimes they remain in the earth according to the nature and condition which is special to each tree. Hence it follows that at the extremities of the branches the nature of the element of water pours forth its fruits on the earth. As soon as ever these fruits drop on the earth they are at once coagu-
