A DISCOURSE 



Besides, we find that air is nearer of kin and affinity to water, than wa- 

 ter is to plants ; unless I should affirm that air itself were but a thinner 

 water ; for how else are those vines, and other trees of prodigious growth, 

 maintained amongst the barren rocks and thirsty pumices, where rains 

 but seldom fall, if not from this rorid air : not to insist again, that per- 

 haps even these rocks themselves may once have sprung from liquid pa- 

 rents ; and how little, even such as are exposed to continual showers, in 

 other climates, abate of their magnitude, since we rather find them to in- 

 crease; and that also the fruits and juices of vegetables seem to be but the 

 concretion of better concocted water, and may not only be converted into 

 ligneous and woody substance, (as the learned Dr. Beale has somewhere 

 instanced in a Discourse presented to you, and recorded in the Public 

 Transactions,) but is apt enough to petrify and become arrant stone. 



Whatever, then, it be which the earth contributes, or whether it contain 

 universally a seminal virtue, so specified by the air, influences, and genius 

 of the clime, as to make that a cinnamon-tree in Ceylon, which is but a 

 bay in England, is past my skill to determine ; but it is to be observed 

 with no little wonder, what INIonsieur Bernier, in his history of the em- 

 pire of the Mogul, affirms to us of a mountain there, which being on 

 one side of it intolerably hot, produces Indian plants, and on the other 

 as intemperately cold, European and vulgar. Not here to pass without 

 notice at least, what even the most exhausted mould will (to all appear- 

 ance) produce spontaneously, when once it has been well exposed to the 

 air and heavenly influences, if what springs up be not possibly from some 

 volatile rudiments and real seeds, transported by winds, higher than we 

 usually place our experiments. But Porta tells us, with more confi- 

 dence, that he took earth from a most profound and dry place, and ex- 

 posed it on such an eminence as to be out of reach even of the winds ; 

 but it produced, it seems, only such plants as grow about Naples, and, 

 therefore, may be suspected. 



To return, then, again from this digression, and pursue our liquids ; 

 where there is good water, there is commonly good earth, and vice versa; 

 because it bridles and tempers the salts, abates the acidity and fierceness 

 of the spirits, and imparts that useful ligatm-e and connexion to the 

 mould, without which it were of no use for vegetation. In the mean 



