716. What is not in idea, prior to the adjustment or fixation of a pole, reduced to ore, can on no account become that out of an already finished mass of earth. Conversions of earth into ore by chemical arts are labours bestowed in vain.
717. Yet if ores do originate, they originate only out of the indefinite Basic, which is still in the water, just as trap stones originate not from a stony dust that pre-existed, but out of the pure indifferent substance of the air.
718. The veins and the formation of ore are one, as are the valleys with the calcareous and salt formations; and he who asks how has the ore originated, must forthwith inquire as to what is the essence of the veins.
719. The ore has not originated externally to the veins and been at some time or other conducted into them by means of water. For how should it thus originate? The reply is, a specific action must have been at work in the fluid, which determined it to separate ore and nothing else. But where is this ore-forming action in the free space of water? Nowhere. And if also the ore had been separated or diffused throughout the whole mass of water, what a world-wonder is it that it merely flowed into the veins and some stockworks? What prevented it from filling in large masses the broader valleys? The mechanical theorist upon metallic veins must assume an attraction on the part of the veins for the ore-particles in water; but how could this attraction have drawn these particles for miles in extent out of the water? and were this action strong enough, it must still be gifted with greater power to produce or at least separate the ore out of the water, that is found in the empty spaces formed by the veins.
720. Since ore has on a large scale separated from the calcareous and salt formations like the Identical from the Different, it has done so also upon a small scale in the veins. There the same process of separation has preceded it.
721. Now, however, nothing can be separated, i. e. nothing be reduced, without the oxygen accumulating upon something else. The Earthy must therefore separate during the formation of metal into the Reduced and Peroxydized.
722. The reduced earthy is the metal or inflammable; the peroxydized, however, an earth proper. This earth is called _vein-stone_.