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The Philosophy of Natural Magic, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, L. W. de Laurence ed.

CHAPTER III. - Of the Four Elements, Their Qualities, and Mutual Mixtions.

There are four Elements, and original grounds of all corporeal things—Fire, Earth, Water, Air—of which all elemented inferior bodies are compounded; not by way of heaping them up together; but by transmutation and union; and when they are destroyed they are resolved into Elements.

For there is none of the sensible Elements that is pure, but they are more or less mixed, and apt to be changed one into the other: Even as Earth becoming dirty, and being dissolved, becomes Water, and the same being made thick and hard, becometh Earth again; but being evaporated through heat, passeth into Air, and that being kindled, passeth into Fire; and this being extinguished, returns back again into Air; but being cooled again after its burning, becomes Earth, or Stone, or Sulphur, and this is manifested by Lightning.

Plato also was of that opinion, that Earth was wholly changeable, and that the rest of the Elements are changed, as into this, so into one another successively. But it is the opinion of the subtler sort of Philosophers, that Earth is not changed, but relented and mixed with other Elements, which do dissolve it, and that it returns back into itself again.