50 NOVUM ORGANUM 



yond the Ganges, and had not even heard any sure and 

 clear tradition of the regions of the New World. Besides, 

 a vast number of climates and zones, in which innumerable 

 nations live and breathe, were pronounced by them to be 

 uninhabitable; nay, the travels of Democritus, Plato, and 

 Pythagoras, which were not extensive, but rather mere 

 excursions from home, were considered as something vast. 

 But in our times many parts of the New World, and every 

 extremity of the Old, are well known, and the mass of 

 experiments has been infinitely increased; wherefore, if ex 

 ternal signs were to be taken from the time of the nativity 

 or procreation (as in astrology), nothing extraordinary could 

 be predicted of these early systems of philosophy. 



LXXIII. Of all signs there is none more certain or 

 worthy than that of the fruits produced, for the fruits and 

 effects are the sureties and vouchers, as it were, for the 

 truth of philosophy. Now, from the systems of the Greeks, 

 and their subordinate divisions in particular branches of the 

 sciences during so long a period, scarcely one single experi 

 ment can be culled that has a tendency to elevate or assist 

 mankind, and can be fairly set down to the speculations 

 and doctrines of their philosophy. Celsus candidly and 

 wisely confesses as much, when he observes thac experi 

 ments were first discovered in medicine, and that men after 

 ward built their philosophical systems upon them, and 

 searched for and assigned causes, instead of the inverse 

 method of discovering and deriving experiments from phi 

 losophy and the knowledge of causes; it is not, therefore, 

 wonderful that the Egyptians (who bestowed divinity and 

 sacred honors on the authors of new inventions) should 

 have consecrated more images of brutes than of men, for 

 the brutes by their natural instinct made many discoveries, 



