Van Helman did not believe in the four-elementalism and three-elementalism advocated by Balassells, nor in Aristotle's "heretical" doctrine of a primordial substance. He asserts that the real elements are air and water, neither of which can be transformed into the other, nor can each be reduced to a simpler state. The other two so-called elements, fire and earth, do not deserve this title. Because fire does not have the form of a substance at all, earth can be formed from water.
He pointed out that on the first day of creation recorded in the book of Genesis, water was created along with heaven and earth. He described the famous "willow experiment" to prove that "all plants grow from elemental water only": I took a clay pot and filled it with 200 pounds of soil that had been dried in the furnace, watered it with rainwater, and planted a willow trunk weighing 5 pounds; After five years, it finally grew into a tree that weighed more than 169 pounds and 3 ounces, but I poured the pot with rain water or distilled water (if needed), and the pot was very large and fixed to the ground, and so that the scattered dust particles would not mix with the soil, I covered the edges of the pot with a tin iron plate with many holes. I didn't count the weight of four autumn leaves. Eventually, I dried the soil in the pot and found that it was only about 2 ounces short of the original 200 pounds. So, 164 pounds of wood, bark, and roots can only be produced from water. This conclusion is generally correct, because the trees are mostly water (fresh willow has about 50% free water), but it is purely a mockery of fate, and Van Heilmont did not know the role of carbon dioxide in the air, because, as mentioned earlier, he was the first to recognize the existence of this gas, and to call it by a special name. A century and a half before Van Hermone, the idea of this famous experiment was included in the writings of Nicolaus of Gusa, but it was not actually done. As a further proof of his doctrine, Van Helman said: Alcohol that carefully removes the mucus with tartar salt gives only water when burned; It is also said that fish are raised in water, and the fatty substances of fish can only be produced by the water in which they swim. He also linked various substances together and proved that they were all made of water, for example, experiments have shown that willow heads are made of water, so all products derived from wood (like charcoal and ash) are also made of water. If gold is also made of water, then it is compressed into 1 16 the original volume of water, and although there are no holes in the water, it is still very possible that the grain is fermented and turned into beer, and some solid residue is still left when the beer evaporates. However, beer can ferment further, become sour, consume this residue, and eventually naturally turn back into water. Earth is not an element, it is formed from water. For, if sand is melted with excess alkali, glass is formed; When glass is exposed to air, it liquefies into water, and if excessive nitric acid is added to saturate the alkali in it, the sand will resettle and be as heavy as the sand used to make glass. Fire is significantly different from light in that it is not an element, it cannot form a component part of an object, it is "the absolute death of things, the one and the same."
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