Volume II in the Ben cao gang mu series offers a complete translation of chapters 5 through 11, devoted to waters, fires, soils, metals, jades, stones, minerals, and salts. The Ben cao gang mu is a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of medical matter and natural history by Li Shizhen (1518-1593). The culmination of a sixteen-hundred-year history of Chinese medical and pharmaceutical literature, it is considered the most...