310 THE PREFACE. 



waste of the first stock, is potentially eternal, as the vestal 

 fire. Therefore, when physicians and philosophers saw 

 that living creatures were nourished and their bodies re 

 paired, hut that this did last only for a time, and afterwards 

 came old age, and in the end dissolution ; they sought 

 death in somewhat which could not properly be repaired, 

 supposing a radical moisture incapable of solid reparation, 

 and which, from the first infancy, received a spurious addi 

 tion, but no true reparation, whereby it grew daily worse 

 and worse, and, in the end, brought the bad to none at all. 

 This conceit of theirs was both ignorant and vain ; for all 

 things in living creatures are in their youth repaired entirely; 

 nay, they are for a time increased in quantity, bettered in 

 quality, so as the matter of reparation might be eternal, if the 

 manner of reparation did not fail. But this is the truth of 

 it. There is in the declining of age an unequal repara 

 tion ; some parts are repaired easily, others with difficulty 

 and to their loss ; so as from that time the bodies of men 

 begin to endure the torments of Mezentius : that the living 

 die in the embraces of the dead ; and the parts easily re 

 pairable, through their conjunction with the parts hardly 

 repairable, do decay ; for the spirits, blood, flesh, and fat 

 are, even after the decline of years, easily repaired ; but the 

 drier and more porous parts (as the membranes, all the 

 tunicles, the sinews, arteries, veins, bones, cartilages, most 

 of the bowels, in a word, almost all the organical parts) are 

 hardly repairable, and to their loss. Now these hardly re 

 pairable parts, when they come to their office of repairing 

 the other, which are easily repairable, finding themselves 

 deprived of their wanted ability and strength, cease to per 

 form any longer their proper functions. By which means 

 it comes to pass, that in process of time the whole tends to 

 dissolution ; and even those very parts which, in their own 

 nature, are with much ease repairable, yet, through the 

 decay of the organs of reparation, can no more receive re 

 paration, but decline, and in the end utterly fail. And the 

 cause of the termination of life is this, for that the spirits, 

 like a gentle flame, continually preying upon bodies, con 

 spiring with the outward air, which is ever sucking and 

 drying of them, do, in time, destroy the whole fabric of the 

 body, as also the particular engines and organs thereof, and 

 make them unable for the work of reparation. These are 

 the true ways of natural death, well and faithfully to be 

 revolved in our minds; for he that knows not the way of 

 nature, how can he succour her or turn her about. 



