Its components are a most pure and tender mercury, a dry incarcerate sulphur, which binds it and restrains fluxation....
Know this subject, it is the sure basis of all our secrets....

To deal plainly, it is the child of Saturn, of mean price and great venom....
It is not malleable, though metalline.

Its colour is sable, with intermixed argent which mark the sable fields with veins of glittering argent." In trying to attach definite meanings to the alchemical accounts of Principles, Elements, and the One Thing, and the directions which the alchemists give for changing one substance into others, we are very apt to be misled by the use of such an expression as _the transmutation of the elements_.

To a chemist that phrase means the change of an element into another element, an element being a definite substance, which no one has been able to produce by the combination of two or more substances unlike itself, or to separate into two or more substances unlike itself.

But whatever may have been the alchemical meaning of the word _element_, it was certainly not that given to the same word to-day.