041r - - - - - Earth for casting, for founders
It renders itself fat once beaten and also mixed with horse dung. Potter’s earth would be too fat and would crack & would not hold in the fire, but one needs to mix it with half the quantity of sand and a quarter or a fifth of horse dung. And leave it to dry, then powder it, then sift it to render it fine & cleansed, which would prevent it from casting neatly. The dung renders the earth more amenable & easier to deal with, but it is necessary that it be well free of straw & other things. And when the earth is very fat, one needs to give it more sand & more dung. But one does find fat varieties of earth, themselves mixed with sand. If they are not, make them so artificially. One always needs to reheat the earths before casting.
Garden lily
If it is broken during its first blossom, it will not grow or bloom until the following year, and I believe it is the same for bulbous flowers in general.
Sand
The sand chosen cast for casting should be neither so lean that it has no stickiness, nor too fat. And even if it is found in nature, however, it is not everywhere. And if you are in a place where it is not found, you can make it, but not with fat earth, for the sand does not want any of that, for it makes it very porous. But you can make it bindable with brick well ground on marble, or plaster or calcinated alabaster or something similar, or the burned marrow of ox horn or burned asphalt. If you grind it quite finely on porphyry, it s acquires stickiness better & then you can burn it with asphalt or mix it with a quarter part of tripoli. Guard against bread falling into your sand because it makes it very porous.
at left middle margin
Try mixing in soot black.
Ducks
Young domestic ones do not grow for a month after hatching but remain in this state. But after, they soon grow up, even if they go into the water. They are fed boiled millet grains, to which are added crumbled bread and finely chopped lettuce.