ing products to the cupellation furnace, where the lead is separated from the
silver. The hooked bar has an iron handle two feet long, in which is set a
wooden one four feet long. The silver-lead which runs out into the receivingpit is poured out by the refiner with a bronze ladle into eight copper moulds,
which are two palms and three digits in diameter; these are first smeared
with a lute wash so that the cakes of silver-lead may more easily fall out
when they are turned over. If the supply of moulds fails because the silverlead flows down too rapidly into the receiving-pit, then water is poured on them,
in order that the cakes may cool and be taken out of them more rapidly;
thus the sa^ne moulds may be used again immediately ; if no such necessity
urges the refiner, he washes over the empty moulds with a lute wash. The
ladle is exactly similar to that which is used in pouring out the metals that
are melted in the blast furnace. When all the silver-lead has run down from
the passage into the receiving-pit, and has been poured out into copper
moulds, the thorns are drawn out of the passage into the receiving-pit
with a rabble ; afterward they are raked on to the ground from the receivingpit, thrown with a shovel into a wheelbarrow, and, having been conveyed
away to a heap, are melted once again. The blade of the rabble is two palms
and as many digits long, two palms and a digit wide, and joined to its
back is an iron handle three feet long; into the iron handle is inserted a
wooden one as many feet in length.
The residue cakes, after the silver-lead has been liquated from the
copper, are called " exhausted liquation cakes " (fathiscentes), because when
thus smelted they appear to be dried up. By placing a crowbar under the
cakes they are raised up, seized with tongs, and placed in the wheelbarrow;
they are then conveyed away to the furnace in which they are " dried."
The crowbar is somewhat similar to those generally used to chip off the
accretions that adhere to the walls of the blast furnace. The tongs are two
and a half feet long. With the same crowbar the stalactites are chipped off
from the copper plates from which they hang, and with the same instrument
the iron blocks are struck off the exhausted liquation cakes to which they
adhere. The refiner has performed his day's task when he has liquated the
silver-lead from sixteen of the large cakes and twenty of the smaller ones ;
if he liquates more than this, he is paid separately for it at the price for
extraordinary work.
Silver, or lead mixed with silver, which we call stannum, is separated by
the above method from copper. This silver-lead is carried to the cupellation
furnace, in which lead is separated from silver; of these methods I will
mention only one, because in the previous book I have explained them in
detail. Amongst us some years ago only forty-four centumpondia of silverlead and one of copper were melted together in the cupellation furnaces,
but now they melt forty-six centumpondia of silver-lead and one and a half
centumpondia of copper; in other places, usually a hundred and twenty
centumpondia of silver-lead alloy and six of copper are melted, in which
manner they make about one hundred and ten centumpondia more or less of
litharge and thirty of hearth-lead. But in all these methods the silver which
