22 



A DISCOURSE 



mercury, and running metal, crystals, gems, and pearls, do more re- 

 semble it, than that dirty and opaque body which we usually denominate 

 earth. Besides, we find how divers waters not only indurate and petrify 

 other substances, but grow into stones, and leave a rocky callus where 

 they drop and continually pass, and that all sands and stones are not dia- 

 phanous, therefore, that is no eviction but that they might once have been 

 fluid, since their opacity may be adventitious, and proceed from sundry 

 accidents ; so as granting this hypothesis, we are less to wonder that this 

 matter is above all other so disposed to vegetation, and apt to produce 

 plants endued with colour, weight, taste, odour, and with sundry medi- 

 cal and other virtues, as I think that excellent philosopher Mr. Boyle, the 

 great ornament of this Society, does somewhere make out from the vari- 

 ous percolations, concoctions, and circulations of that fruitful menstruum; 

 and if that be true, that there is but one catholic, homogeneous, fluid 

 matter, (diversified only by shape, size, motion, repose, and various texture 

 of the minute particles it consists of, and from which affections of mat- 

 ter, the divers qualities result of particular bodies,) what may not mixture 

 and an attentive inspection into the anatomical parts of the vegetable 

 family in time produce, for our composing of all sorts of moulds and 

 soils almost imaginable, which is the drift of my present Discourse ? 

 And why might not Solomon, by this means, have really had all kinds of 

 plants in his incomparable gardens ? even ebony, cloves, cinnamon, and 

 from the cedar to the shrub, such as grew only in the remotest regions, 

 furnished (as he doubtless was) with so extraordinary an insight into all 

 natural things and powers for the composing of earths, and assigning 

 them their proper mixtures and ferments I do not here inquire whe- 

 ther there be not 2i pansperme universally diffused, individuated, and spe- 

 cified in their several matrixes and receptacles pro ratione mixti, as they 

 speak, but I think there might very unexpected phasnomena be brought 

 to light in vegetable productions, did men seriously apply themselves to 

 make such possible trials as is in the power of art to effect ; and how far 



* It is climate, and not soil, that occasions such a variety in plants ; so that unless we 

 can give a foreign plant something of its own climate, it will be in vain to rear it even in 

 its own earth. Of this, Mons. Tournefort, in his travels into the east, had very con- 

 vincing proofs. At the bottom of Mount Ararat, he found the common plants of Armenia ; 

 a little higher up, those of Italy; higher, those which grow about Paris; afterwards, the 

 Swedish plants ; and lastly, on the top, the alpine plants of Lapland. 



