Valuable Secrets concerning Arts and Trades:
or Approved Directions, from the best Artists, for the Various Methods...
Printed by Thomas Hubbard,
Norwich, 1795Chap. V. Secrets concerning colours & painting.
§ VIII. Preparations of colours of all sorts for oil, water, and crayons.
CXXVII. Directions to make cinnabar, or, vermilion.
1. Put mercury (or quick silver) in a glazed dish. Set it on a sand-bath, and let it be well surrounded with the sand every way. Pour some melted brimstone over it; and, with an iron spatula, keep constantly stirring, till the whole is converted into a black powder.
2. With this powder, fill the quarter part of a retort with a short and wide neck. Place it first on a fire of cinders. Then increase the fire by degrees, and continue it so for ten hours; after which you may make a blasting one for twelve hours.
3. Observations. - By the first fire, there will arise a black fume. - By the second, a yellow. - And by the last a red; which signifies the perfect accomplishment of the cinnabar. - As soon as this is the case, let the vessel cool, and you will find, in the receiver, and in the neck of the retort, a very fine cinnabar.
N. B. There are many who, instead of a glass retort, use earthen, or stone ones, which all equally bear the fire. They make a slow fire for about half an hour, then incrcase and continue it till they see the red fumes arising, Both methods are equally good, and answer perfectly the same purpose.
CXXVIII. Another very different, method of making cinnabar.
1. Melt, in a pipkin, some brimstone over a slow fire. When melted, take it out, and with one hand squeeze a knot of mercury between your fingers through a cloth into the melted sulphur; and, with the other, stir well till the lump is become quite cold and black.
2 Put this into a subtile powder, with which having filled the fourth part of a very long retort, you will lute it well, and very exactly, with a good lute. Place it next, without a receiver, for two or three hours, on, a very mild fire; then introduce into the retort a long funnel which will reach as far as the matter, and even to the bottom of the retort; through that funnel pass a long spatula, which touching also the bottom of the retort, should come out of the funnel five or six inches. In the middle of the spatula let there be a bung of lute round it, well dried, which will stop so well the retort as to prevent it from breathing any air. When all this is done, puih on the fire to a pretty smart degree, and keep it so for five hours.
3. At the end of this term, draw out the spatula, and introduce, through the same way that it came out, two spoonfuls, or thereabouts, of your prepared powder of brimstone and quicksilver, with which you intend to make cinnabar, and which you shall, for that purpose, have kept warm in a vessel by the corner of the fire, that it may not cool the retort in going in, and thereby retard the operation.
4. Continue so to do, adding every hour new matter, by means of the drawing out the spatula to introduce the new powder, and replacing it quickly, till you have increased your lump of cinnabar to the quantity of one hundred weight. - The spatula's use in the neck of the retort is to prevent its filling itself up by the sublimation of the matter, which would occasion two evils, that of breaking of the retort, and of preventing the introduction of new powder to increase the lump of cinnabar. So that, at the same time it keeps a free passage into the retort, it nevertheless stops it too, by means of the ball of lute which is round it. - But, in the last place, in order there mould remain no vacancy in the middle of the cinnabar-lump, take off the spatula for the last time, and inject fresh powder; then, without reintroducing the spatula, stop the retort with a lump of lute only. - Thus, the longer you keep the fire up, the harder and redder the lump of cinnabar becomes.
5. Observations. - This cinnabar is the very same which empyricks use in fumigation, along with aloes wood, myrrh and other aromatics, to excite the mouth, or belly, flux, which they reiterate two or three times, or till that flux is abundant enough to procure the cure of the venerian disorder. - It is the same also which painters make use of; and which enters into the composition of sealing wax.
There are alchymists who maintain, they can with the natural or fictitious cinnabar we have just mentioned resolve irreductibly either gold or silver; because they are of opinion, that these metals have sprung from it in the entrails of the earth. But it is proper to tell them here, that they would not perhaps commit so gross an error, if they attempted this process with the cinnabar, which the philosopher endeavours to draw from quick gold and silver, and which are known to him alone. To which reflection I shall add, that he to whom quick gold and silver are known can do with them also every thing as with the metals; but as the old saying is, Non licet omnibus adire Chorintam.
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