The Alchemist's Hamwock

The idea of a distilling water into its four elements came from friday alburtis, and he talks about it in his little book, the alchemist's hamwock. Most of the concepts which originally described alchemy came out of the paralytic school. The order in which the elements come off that substance is the same in every realm. And this is one of the reasons why alchemists believed that what they were doing was a universal process.