TO THE READER. 89 



and profitable instances as are already published to the world, and will 

 be easily asserted to their authors before all equitable judges. 



This being the sole inducement of publishing this apology, it may not 

 perhaps seem unseasonable to disabuse some, otherwise, well-meaning 

 people, who led away and perverted by the noise of a few ignorant and 

 comical buffoons, (whose malevolence or impertinences entitle them to 

 nothing that is truly great and venerable,) are, with an insolence suitable 

 to their understanding, still crying out, and asking. What have the 

 Society done ? 



Now, as nothing less than miracles (nor those, unless God should every 

 day repeat them at the call of these extravagants) will convince some 

 persons of the most rational and divine truths, already so often and extra- 

 ordinarily established, so neither will any thing- satisfy these unreasonable 

 men, but the production of the Philosopher's Stone and Great Elixir ; 

 Which yet were they possessors of, they would consume upon their 

 luxury and vanity. 



It is not, therefore, to gratify these magnificent fops, whose talents 

 reach but to the adjusting of their peruques, courting a miss, or at the 

 farthest, writing a smutty or scurrilous libel, which they would have to 

 pass for genuine wit, that I concern myself in these papers ; but, as well 

 in honour of our Royal Founder, as the nation, to assert what by other 

 countries has been surreptitiously arrogated, and by which they not only 

 value themselves abroad, but, prevailing on the modesty of that industrious 

 assembly, seek the deference of those who, whilst it remains still silent, 

 do not so clearly discern this glorious plumage to be purely ascititious, 

 and not a feather of their own. But still, what have they done ? 



Those who perfectly comprehend the scope and end of that noble 

 Institution, which is to improve natural knowledge, and enlarge the 

 empire of operative philosophy, not by an abolition of the old, but by the 

 real effects of the experimental, collecting, examining, and improving their 

 scattered pheenomena, with a view to establish even the received methods 

 and principles of the schools, as far as were consistent with truth and 

 matter of fact, thought it long enough that the world had been imposed 

 upon by that notional and formal way of delivering divers systems and 

 bodies of philosophy, falsely so called, beyond which there was no more 

 country to discover ; which being brought to the test and trial, vapours 

 all away in fume and empty sound. 



Fa 



