Part of the First Dialogue.

will make all other appear as needless as it self will be found Satisfactory. For if You but consider a piece of green-Wood burning in a Chimney, You will readily discern in the disbanded parts of it the four Elements, of which we teach It and other mixt bodies to be compos’d. The fire discovers it self in the flame by its own light; the smoke by ascending to the top of the chimney, and there readily vanishing into air, like a River losing it self in the Sea, sufficiently manifests to what Element it belongs and gladly returnes. The water in its own form boyling and hissing at the ends of the burning Wood betrayes it self to more then one of our senses; and the ashes by their weight, their firiness, and their dryness, put it past doubt that they belong to the Element of Earth. If I spoke (continues Themistius) to less knowing Persons, I would perhaps make some Excuse for building upon such an obvious and easie Analysis, but ’twould be, I fear, injurious, not to think such an Apology needless to You, who are too judicious either to think it necessary that Experiments to prove obvious truths should be farr fetch’d, or to wonder that among so many mixt Bodies that are compounded of the four Elements, some of them should upon a slight Analysis manifestly exhibite the Ingredients they consist of. Especially since it is very agreeable to the Goodness of Nature, to disclose, even in some of the most obvious Experiments that Men make, a Truth so important, and so requisite to be taken notice of by them. Besides that our Analysis by how much the more obvious we make it, by so much the more suittable it will be to the Nature of that Doctrine which ’tis alledged to prove, which being as clear and intelligible to the Understanding as obvious to the sense, tis no marvail the learned part of Mankind should so long and so generally imbrace it. For this Doctrine is very different from the whimseys of Chymists and other Modern Innovators, of whose Hypotheses we may observe, as Naturalists do of less perfect Animals, that as they are hastily form’d, so they are commonly short liv’d. For so these, as they are often fram’d in one week, are perhaps thought fit to be laughed at the next; and being built perchance but upon two or three Experiments are destroyed by