30 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1672. 



After a narrative of the chief hypotheses and opinions of both ancient and 

 recent astronomers, concerning the system of the world, and having represented 

 the great difficulties in the Ptolemaic and Tychonic, and repeated the answers 

 to the objections against the Copernlcan; the author at large gives us his own 

 thoughts of the frame and constitution of the world; by which world he under- 

 stands, in his treatise, the complex of the planets, disposed and ordered much 

 after the Gopernican way, the sun being seated in the midst, having his spots 

 about him, and moving and influencing all the rest of the planets according to 

 their several distances from him ; Saturn making the utmost of all the planets, 

 and the end of this his world being where the diffusive power and virtue of the 

 sun, the king and governor of them all, terminates, which bounds he conjec- 

 tures to extend themselves, beyond Saturn, to those fixed stars that are of the 

 nearer rank to Saturn's orb. 



Concerning the bodies lodged in these planets, he thinks it consonant to the 

 power and wisdom of the Great Creator, that there should be such a variety of 

 them, as to stock each of the said planets with creatures differing from those of 

 others: so that nothing of what is in (e. g.J our earth or terraqueous globe, is 

 to be found In any of the other planets, but that every one of them is stored 

 with peculiar creatures, and even with such reasonable ones, as are of another 

 kind from the men of our earth. 



In the body of the work, many experiments, contrivances, and effects, are 

 described; in which, however, the ingenious author has been, in many instances, 

 preceded by our illustrious Boyle. 



One curious experiment, in which he seems to be singular, may be here 

 noticed, being an early instance of electricity, though he seemed to have some 

 other mysterious ideas about it. 



By which experiment he thinks may be represented the chief virtues he enu- 

 merates of our earth, performed by a globe of sulphur melted and cooled again, 

 and then perforated, to traject an iron axis through it for circumvolution ; 

 whereby attrition being used withal, he affirms that the impulsive, attractive, 

 expulsive, and other virtues of the earth, as he calls them, may be ocularly 

 exhibited. 



II. Thesaurus Mediclnae Practlcse ; studio et opera Thomas Burnet Scoto 

 Britanni, M-.D, et Medici Regis Ordinarii. Lond. 1672, in 4to. 



A compilation from the ancients, and the principal medical writers up to the 

 17 th century. 



