INTELLECTUAL GLOBE. 157 



ject may seem open to the labour of all, in the same pro 

 portion, there is greater risk of their deviating from the 

 design, and we have therefore distinguished it as forming 

 the third part of our history; yet faithfully observe our 

 purpose of explaining and exhibiting what hath been neg 

 lected, and place some part of science in security, should 

 we be cut off by any of the accidents of humanity ; we have 

 thought it good to add now and in this place, our senti 

 ments and counsels respecting this subject. We set down 

 of the history of generations, or nature at large, five divi 

 sions. These are the history of the ether, the history of 

 meteors and of the regions of the air as they are called ; for 

 the lower track circumambient to the earth s surface, and to 

 the bodies which are placed in it, we refer to the history of 

 meteors. Thirdly, there follows the history of the earth and 

 sea, which conjointly compose one globe. And so far 

 nature is divided according to place, and the things occu 

 pying those places. The other two parts discriminate sub 

 stances, or rather masses of substances. For homogeneous 

 substances are usually collected in larger or smaller masses, 

 which we have been wont to name larger and smaller col 

 leges of things, and they have the same relation as in 

 human polity a tribe and family. Therefore we place the 

 fourth ill order, the history of the elements or larger col 

 leges ; fifthly and lastly, the history of species or smaller 

 colleges. We mean elements to be taken in this sense, not 

 that they should be understood as the principles of things, 

 but as larger masses of connatural substances. That larger 

 size happens by reason of the manageable, simple, obvious, 

 and perfected texture of the matter; whereas species are 

 furnished by nature sparingly, because of the dissimilarity, 

 and in most instances, the organic structure of the texture. 

 Now of the history of those properties which may be re 

 garded as the cardinal and catholic virtues of nature, den 

 sity, rarity, levity, gravity, heat, cold, consistency, fluidity, 

 similarity, dissimilarity, specific, organic, and the like, 

 along with the motions contributing to them, as of antitype, 

 connexion, coition, expansion, and the rest of such proper 

 ties and motions (the history of which we would have col 

 lected and complete before we come to the point, where the 

 intellect is to work upon them), and of the mode of pre 

 paring that history ; we shall discourse after finishing the 

 explanation of the three divisions, generation, prater-gene 

 ration, and arts. For we have not comprehended that 

 among the three divisions, since it is not properly a history, 



