XIII. 2. ‘THE SECOND BOOK. 151 
’ 
flints he expected the spark: and therefore we see the 
West Indian Prometheus had no intelligence with the 
European, because of the rareness with them of flint, 
that gave the first occasion. So as it should seem, that 
hitherto men are rather beholden to a wild goat for sur- 
gery, or to a nightingale for music, or to the ibis for some 
part of physic, or to the pot-lid that flew open for artillery, 
or generally to chance or anything else than to logic for 
the invention of arts and sciences. Neither is the form 
of invention which Virgil describeth much other : 
Ut varias usus meditando extunderet artes 
Paulatim. 
For if you observe the words well, it is no other method 
than that which brute beasts are capable of, and do put 
in ure; which is a perpetual intending or practising some 
one thing, urged and imposed by an absolute necessity 
of conservation of being. For so Cicero saith very truly, 
Usus unt ret deditus et naturam et artem se@pe vincit. And 
therefore if it be said of men, 
Labor omnia vincit 
Improbus, et duris urgens in rebus egestas, 
it is likewise said of beasts, Quzs pstttaco docuit suum 
xaipe? Who taught the raven in a drowth to throw 
pebbles into an hollow tree, where she spied water, that 
the water might rise so as she might come to it? Who 
taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea of air, and 
to find the way from a field in flower a great way off to 
her hive? Who taught the ant to bite every grain of 
corn that she burieth in her hill, lest it should take root 
and grow? Add then the word ex/undere, which im- 
porteth the extreme difficulty, and the word paulatim, 
which importeth the extreme slowness, and we are where 
