410 HISTORY OF 



Moveable Canons of the Duration of Life and Form 

 of Death. 



CANON I. 



Consumption is not caused, unless that which is departed 

 with by one. body passeth into another. 



THE EXPLICATION. 



There is in nature no annihilating, or reducing to nothing. 

 Therefore that which is consumed, is either resolved into 

 air, or turned into some body adjacent. So we see a spider, 

 or fly, or ant in amber, entombed in a more stately monu 

 ment than kings are ; to be laid up for eternity, although 

 they be but tender things, and soon dissipated. But the 

 matter is this, that there is no air by, into which they should 

 be resolved, and the substance of the amber is so hetero 

 geneous, that it receives nothing of them. The like we 

 conceive would be if a stick, or root, or some such thing 

 were buried in quicksilver ; also wax, and honey, and gums, 

 have the same operation, but in part only. 



CANON II. 



There is in every tangible body a spirit, covered and en 

 compassed with the grosser parts of the body, and from it all 

 consumption and dissolution hath the beginning. 



THE EXPLICATION. 



No body known unto us here in the upper part of the 

 earth is without a spirit, either by attenuation and concoc 

 tion from the heat of the heavenly bodies, or by some other 

 way; for the concavities of tangible things receive not 

 vacuum, but either air, or the proper spirit of the thing. 

 And this spirit whereof we speak, is not from virtue, or 

 energy, or act, or a trifle, but plainly a body, rare and in 

 visible ; notwithstanding circumscribed by place, quantita 

 tive, real. Neither, again, is that spirit air (no more than 

 wine is water), but a body rarefied, of kin to air, though 

 much different from it. Now the grosser parts of bodies 

 (being dull things, and not apt for motion) would last a 

 long time ; but the spirit is that which troubleth, and 

 plucketh, and undermineth them, and converteth the mois 

 ture of the body, and whatsoever it is able to digest, into 

 new spirit ; and then as well the preexisting spirit of the 

 body, as that newly made fly away together by degrees. 

 This is best seen by the diminution of the weight in bodies 



