Antoine Fourcroy was a famous French chemist. In 1804 he published A General System of Chemical Knowledge, which had an entire book on \"philosophical dew\". He and his partner distilled hundreds of gallons of it.
I learned of his work in late 90's and drove to San Francisco where there was an English version. This I transcribed in 1998 into a voice recorder since I could not photocopy or remove the book. You may download a copy at http://cista.net/fourcroy
Here you will learn such tricks as taking your reduced goo of \"philosophical dew\" and dissolving it in alcohol, which will leave the minerals behind, and you can get a purer "gur."
The end result for me at the time was a very piercing ammoniacal salt.
Picture 1: \"philosophical dew\" reduced; it shot crystals. Never could get it to do this again!
Picture 2: The Uree (as Fourcroy called it), ie the gur without insoluable minerals and its distillation setup:
Picture 3: the "net and stars" of the subliming salt
Picture 4: The salt is very sticky at first and must go thru repeated sublimations (eagles). It becomes lighter and lighter and sharper. At first you must struggle to chip it off the inside of your receiver due to the sticky impurities. I trick I found was to distill into a plastic bottle. This bottle is flexible and you can just bang it with your hand to loosen the salt
After it cleans up a bit you can use a double subliminator, just turning it upside down each time, and removing the oily dregs from the bottom:
Subject: Fourcroy on "philosophical dew" 
Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:14 pm
