XLI

Among Prerogative Instances I will put in the eighteenth place Instances of the Road, which I also call Traveling Instances and Articulate Instances. They are those which point out the motions of nature in their gradual progress. This class of instances escapes the observation rather than the sense. For it is strange how careless men are in this matter; for they study nature only by fits and at intervals, and when bodies are finished and completed, not while she is at work upon them. Yet if anyone were desirous of examining and studying the contrivances and industry of an artificer, he would not be content with beholding merely the rude materials of the art and then the completed works, but would rather wish to be present while the artificer was at his labors and carrying his work on. And a like course should be taken with the investigation of nature. For instance, if we are inquiring into the vegetation of plants, we must begin from the very sowing of the seed, and observe (as we may easily do, by taking out day after day the seeds that have lain in the ground two days, three days, four days, and so on, and carefully examining them) how and when the seed begins to puff and swell and to be, as it were, filled with spirit; secondly, how it begins to burst the skin and put forth fibers, at the same time raising itself slightly upwards, unless the ground be very stiff; also, how it puts forth its fibers, some for the root downwards and some for the stem upwards, and sometimes also creeping sideways if it there finds the ground more open and yielding; and so with many other things of the kind. In the same way we should examine the hatching of eggs, in which we might easily observe the whole process of vivification and organization, and see what parts proceed from the yolk and what from the white of the egg, and so forth. A similar course should be taken with animals generated from putrefaction. For to prosecute such inquiries concerning perfect animals by cutting out the fetus from the womb would be too inhuman, except when opportunities are afforded by abortions, the chase, and the like. There should therefore be set a sort of night watch over nature, as showing herself better by night than by day. For these may be regarded as night studies by reason of the smallness of our candle and its continual burning.

The same too should be attempted with inanimate substances, as I have done myself in investigating the expansion of liquids by fire. For there is one mode of expansion in water, another in wine, another in vinegar, another in verjuice, and quite another in milk and oil; as was easily to be seen by boiling them over a slow fire and in a glass vessel in which everything may be clearly distinguished. These matters, however, I touch but briefly, meaning to treat of them more fully and exactly when I come to the discovery of the Latent Process of things. For it should all along be borne in mind that in this place I am not handling the things themselves, but only giving examples.