SAL AMMONIAC.

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conceived, from the known properties of the article now sonamed, that their sal ammoniacus could not have been whatwe have now under that appellation, the taste of ours beingvery nauseous and disagreeable.

The preceding - consideration, contrasted with what weshall presently submit, leaves the matter to the commonsense of every one, whether the article used by the ancients,and by them termed sal ammoniacus, could be the samewhich we now identify by the same term, as the sal ammo-niac of the moderns.

The Egyptian priesthood, in their sacred solemnities, andalso the native manufacturers, in their manufacturing avoca-tions, consumed large quantities of salt. Insomuch so, that it ispresumed they could not obtain a sufficiency for every pur-pose, from the natural produce of the earth. And we wantnot authorities, who assure us, that to supply their ownwants, and likewise to satisfy those of the mercantile inte-rests of their country, they had a mode of preparing anartificial salt, to which they gave the same appellation, thatwe have seen they applied to their natural produce.

The materials from which they compounded their artifi-cial production, are said to have been produced at theEgyptian manufactory by the soot of burnt camel and cowdung, which is used for fuel in Egypt , marine salt, andhuman urine. This, Sicard says, is what it is manufacturedfrom at Demayer, in the Delta of Lower Egypt , by the pro-cess of sublimation, by the same means which our philosophicBoyle 4 5 had spoken of as remote as his day; and what was an-ticipated by the younger Geoffrey, i.e. that sal ammoniac wascomposed of the muriatic and volatile alkalies, appears tohave been a fact. s Indeed, in the year 1716, the Jesuit ,Sicard, gave the first certain intelligence of the processobserved at the manufactories at Demayer in the Delta ,describing in what manner the salt was there produced bysublimation in glass vessels. Also, in 1719, the French Academy of Sciences at Paris , received from Le Mere,French Consul at Grand Cairo, an account of the processemployed ; but it contained no report of the marine salt orthe urine. This information was in part afterwards con-firmed, in part rectified and enlarged, by Paul LucasGrainger, otherwise known by his proper appellation ofTourtechot. The evidence of those most respectable tra-

4 Vide proofs quoted in Gemlin’s Geschichte der Chemic, ii. p. 69.

5 Memoires de l’Acad. 1720, p 193. Basil Valentine , it is said, had before thattime taught how to separate volatile alkali from sal ammoniac, by means of fixedalkali.