50 



BR. K. ANGUS SMITH ON ANCIENT AND 



to carry on a work of any kind in the place where no 

 works of that kind are known, without long and laborious y 

 teaching and often much loss. The generations teach their 

 next generations their own peculiar movement, and it might 

 almost be expected that after a time children should be born 

 which, like pointer puppies that point by instinct, should, 

 by some instinctive movement, tie unseen threads in the air. 

 The general system of work is in the lower stage, or imitative, 

 and has only partially risen into the higher, or self-supporting 

 independent stage, as the sciences and some more refined arts 

 have done. We want theoretical teachers, that the men may 

 cease to be mere attachments of the town or mill, — a serfdom 

 inherent in ignorance and incapacity. It is from this want of 

 the means of communicating knowledge, that the first steps 

 of civilization have to be repeated so frequently, and we 

 must be constantly learning the beginning, when we might 

 be employed in unravelling the difficulties liiat constantly 

 become more complex. 



The learned discourse of Sir Kenelm Digby on the Power 

 of Sympathy, from which I gave an extract, was published 

 in English in 1658 ; and he might have been supposed to 

 know better, but the great men even of that great century 

 were not in all things on the shoulders of their predecessors, 

 so hard was it to know what was done. 



I obtained some time ago a little collection of old opinions 

 in a small volume which I have never met but once, when I 

 got it at a London old bookshop, and which, from a passage 

 in it, I suppose to be either very rare or seldom read. It is by 

 Philip Beroaldus. I may perhaps introduce here, somewhat 

 contractedly, a part of his treatise on Pestilence : — 



" Pestilence not only exhausts towns by constant deaths, 

 but even whole nations, by a deadly disease. Some say that 

 it is from the anger of God, some from the inclemency of 

 the weather, and some from vitiated waters ; — others from the 

 noxious exhalations of the earth. 



