INTELLECTUAL GLOBE. 153 



part of it, as we have already stated, employed about spe 

 cies. But we attempt a partition of natural history, de 

 rived from the tendency and condition of nature herself, 

 which is found placed in three several states, and subject 

 as it were to three modes of government. For nature is 

 either free, spontaneously diffusing and developing itself in 

 its wonted course, that is, when nature depends upon itself, 

 in no way obstructed and subdued, as in the heavens, ani 

 mals, plants, and all the natural productions ; or again, it 

 is evidently torn down and precipitated from its proper 

 state by the pravity and erratic tendency of Obdurate and 

 resisting matter, or by violence of obstacles, as is the case 

 in the care of monsters and unnatural productions ; or, 

 finally, it is coerced by the art and industry of man, 

 fashioned, altered, and as it were made anew, as in things 

 artificial. For in things artificial nature seems as it were 

 new made, and there is seen a new face of things, or second 

 universe. Wherefore natural history of either the liberty 

 of nature or its errors into bonds. Now if it be unpleasing 

 to any one that the arts should be called the bonds of 

 nature, since they are rather to be considered its deliverers 

 and champions, since they make nature in some instances 

 mistress of her object, by reducing obstacles into her order. 

 We regard little such delicacies and elegancies of lan 

 guage. We only mean to signify this, that nature, by 

 means of arts, is placed by compulsion under a necessity of 

 doing that which without arts would not have been done, 

 whether that be denominated force and bonds, or assistance, 

 and consummating skill. We shall therefore divide natu 

 ral history into the history of generations, the history of 

 preter-generations, and the history of arts, which we are 

 accustomed to call mechanical and experimental history. 

 And we willingly place the history of arts among the spe 

 cies of natural history, because these has obtained a now 

 inveterate mode of speaking and notion, as if art were 

 something different from nature, so that things artificial 

 ought to be discriminated from things natural, as if wholly 

 and generically different ; whence arises this evil, that most 

 writers of natural history think they have accomplished 

 their task if they have achieved a history of animals, 

 plants, or minerals, omitting the experiments of mechanics, 

 which are of by far the greatest consequence to philosophy; 

 and there has insinuated itself into mens minds a still 

 subtler error, namely this, that art is conceived to be a 

 sort of addition to nature, the proper effect of which is 



