_Mercury_
also though reduc'd into Sublimate, and Praecipitated with Liquors abounding
with Volatile Salts, as the Spirits drawn from Urine, Harts-horn, and other
Animal substances, yet will afford, as we Noted in our first Experiment
about Whiteness and Blackness, a White Praecipitate, yet with some Solutions
hereafter to be mentioned, it will let fall an Orange-Tawny Powder. And so
will Crude _Antimony_, if, being dissolv'd in a strong Lye, you pour (as
farr as I remember) any Acid Liquor upon the Solution newly Filtrated,
whilst it is yet Warm. And if upon the Filtrated Solution of _Vitriol_, you
pour a Solution of one of these fix'd Salts, there will subside a Copious
substance, very farr from having any Whiteness, which the Chymists are
pleas'd to call, how properly I have elsewhere examin'd, the _Sulphur of
Vitriol_. So that most part of Dissolv'd Bodyes being by Praecipitation
brought to White Powders, and yet some affording Praecipitates of other
Colours, the reason of both the Phaenomena may deserve to be enquir'd into.
_EXPERIMENT XIII._
Some Learned Modern Writers[15] are of Opinion, that the Account upon which
Whiteness and Blackness ought to be call'd, as they commonly are, the two
Extreme Colours, is, That Blackness (by which I presume is meant the Bodyes
endow'd with it) receives no other Colours; but Whiteness very easily
receives them all; whence some of them compare Whiteness to the
_Aristotelian Materia prima_, that being capable of any sort of Forms, as
they suppose White Bodyes to be of every kind of Colour.
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