Less Learned and Less Tedious Than the Preceding. Continuation of the Academical Sitting
By the difficulties started against Orcotomus, before he could make his experiments, it appeared, that his notions were judged to have less of solidity than ingenuity. “If Toys have the faculty of speech naturally,” say they, “why have they not made use of it till now? If it was an effect of the goodness of Brama, who has been pleased to endow women with so strong a desire of talking, to double the organs of speech in them; it is very strange, that they have so long been ignorant of, or at least neglected this valuable gift of nature. Why has not the same Toy spoke more than once? Why has none of them spoke of aught but the same subject? By what mechanism does it fall out, that one of the mouths is forcibly kept shut, while the other speaks? Moreover,” added they, “if we judge of the prattle of Toys by the circumstances, in which most of them have spoken, and by the things they have told; there is all the reason in the world to believe it involuntary, and that those parts would continue mute, if it had been in the power of their possessors to impose silence on them.”