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TO THE READER. 



This structure then being thus ruinous and crazy, it is obvious what 

 they were to do ; even the same which skilful architects do every day 

 before us ; by pulling down the decayed and sinking wall, to erect a 

 better and more substantial in its place. They not only take down the 

 old, reject the useless and decayed, but sever such materials as are solid, 

 and will serve again ; bring new ones in, prepare and frame a model 

 suitable to so magnificent a design : This Solomon did in order to the 

 building of the material temple ; and this is here to be pursued in the 

 intellectual : Nay, here was abundance of rubbish to be cleared, that the 

 area might be free ; and then was the foundation to be deeply searched, 

 the materials accurately examined, squared, and adjusted before it could 

 be laid : Nor was this the labour of a few ; less than a much longer time, 

 more cost and encouragement than any which the Society has yet met 

 withal, could not in reason be sufficient, effectually to go through so 

 chargeable a work, and highly necessary. 



A long time it was they had been surveying the decays of what was 

 ready now to drop in pieces. Whatever show the outside made with a 

 noise of elements and qualities, occult and evident, abhorrence of vacuum, 

 sympathies, antipathies, substantial forms, and prime matter courting 

 form ; epicycles, Ptolemean hypotheses, magisterial definitions, peremptory 

 maxims, speculative and positive doctrines, and alti-sonant phrases, with 

 a thousand other precarious and unintelligible notions, (all which they 

 have been turning over to see if they could find any thing sincere and 

 useful among this pedantic rubbish, but in vain,) here was nothing ma- 

 terial, nothing of moment, mathematical or mechanical, and which had 

 not been miserably sophisticated, on which to lay the stress ; nothing in 

 a manner whereby any farther progress could be made, for the raising 

 and ennobling the dignity of mankind in the sublimest operations of the 

 rational faculty, by clearing the obscurities, and healing the defects of 

 most of the physiological hypotheses, repugnant, as they hitherto seemed 

 to be, to the principles of real knowledge and experience. 



Now, although it was neither in their hopes or in their prospect to 

 consummate a design requiring so mighty aids, environed as they have 

 been with these prejudices, yet have they not desisted from the enterprize ; 

 but rather than so noble and illustrious an undertaking should not proceed 

 for want of some generous and industrious spirits to promote the work, 

 they have themselves submitted to those mean employments of digging 



