X. 8.] | THE SECOND BOOK. 141 
’ 
to the confections of sale which are in the shops, they 
are for readiness and not for propriety. For they are 
upon general intentions of purging, opening, comforting, 
altering, and not much appropriate to particular diseases. 
And this is the cause why empirics and old women are 
more happy many times in their cures than learned phy- 
sicians, because they are more religious in holding their 
medicines. ‘Therefore here is the deficience which I find, 
that physicians have not, partly out of their own practice, 
partly out of the constant probations reported in books, 
and partly out of the traditions of empirics, set down and 
delivered over certain experimental medicines for the cure 
of particular diseases, besides their own conjectural and 
magistral descriptions. For as they were the men of the 
best composition in the state of Rome, which either being 
consuls inclined to the people, or being tribunes inclined 
to the senate; so in the matter we now handle, they be 
the best physicians, which being learned incline to the 
traditions of experience, or being empirics incline to the 
methods of learning. 
g. In preparation of medicines I do find strange, 
specially considering how mineral medicines pias 
have been extolled, and that they are safer nature in 
for the outward than inward parts, that no balneis, et 
man hath sought to make an imitation by art 7s ™edi- 
of natural baths and medicinable fountains: “"@“2™* 
which nevertheless are confessed to receive their virtues 
from minerals: and not so only, but discerned and dis- 
tinguished from what particular mineral they receive tinc- 
ture, as sulphur, vitriol, steel, or the like: which nature, 
if it may be reduced to compositions of art, both the 
variety of them will be increased, and the temper of them 
will be more commanded, 
