CIVIL AND NATURAL. XXIX 



may reside in different parts of the country: and the 

 mention of their art leads me to the various uses of na- 

 tural substances, in the three kingdoms or classes to 

 which they are generally reduced. 



III. You cannot but have remarked, that almost all 

 the sciences, as the French call them, which are distin- 

 guished by Greek names and arranged under the head 

 of philosophy, belong for the most part to history; 

 such as philology, chemistry, physic, anatomy, and 

 even metaphysics, when we barely relate the phenome-* 

 na of the human mind ; for, in all blanches of know-* 

 ledge, we are only historians when we announce facts, 

 and philosophers only when we reason on them : the. 

 same may be confidently said of law and of medicine, 

 the first of which belongs principally to civil, and the 

 second chiefly to natural history. Here, therefore, I 

 speak of medicine, as far only as it is grounded on ex- 

 periment ; and, without believing implicitly what 

 Arabs, Persians, Chinese, or Hindus may have written 

 on the virtues of medicinal subjects, we may, surely, 

 hope to find in their writings what our own experiments 

 may confirm or disprove, and what might never have, 

 occurred to us without such intimations. 



Europeans enumerate more than two hundred and 

 fifty mechanical arts, by which the productions of na- 

 ture may be variously prepared for the convenience and 

 ornament of life ; and, though the Silfasastra reduce 

 them to sixty-four, yet Abulfazl had been assured that 

 the Hindus reckoned three hundred arts and sciences : 

 now, their sciences being comparatively few, we may 



conclude 



