However, not to interrupt your microscopical inspections, said she, let us see how vegetables appear through your glasses; whereupon they took a nettle, and by the virtue of the microscope, discovered that underneath the points of the nettle there were certain little bags or bladders, containing a poisonous liquor, and when the points had made way into the interior parts of the skin, they like syringe-pipes served to convey that same liquor into them. To which observation the Empress replied, that if there were such poison in nettles, then certainly in eating of them, they would hurt us inwardly, as much as they do outwardly? But they answered, that it belonged to physicians more than to experimental philosophers, to give reasons hereof; for they only made microscopical inspections, and related the figures of the natural parts of creatures according to the representation of their glasses.

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