it a part of the homage I owe to his eternal Majesty, to be satisfied in such an end as this.”

"I will transfer this meditation to the exercises which are to fill a life of piety. Have I not reason enough, motive enough, to abound in all the exercises of a pious life, even the most secret of them, and a guard upon the frames and thoughts of my heart within me? The great God is the beholder of my whole behaviour, he knows the way that I take; and I choose the things that please him in what I am now doing."

Finding myself now entered into the animal world, I take this opportunity to insert and pursue an observation of the acute Dr. Cheyne; which is, that the production of animals is a thing altogether inconsistent with the laws of mechanism: from whence I infer, that it must be from something superior to them.

For first, the blood is by the force of the heart squeezed from the left ventricle, through the arteries, to the extremities of the body, and is thence returned by the veins into the right ventricle, thence by the arteria pulmonalis into the lungs from the lungs by the vena pulmonalis again into the right ventricle. The motion of the heart is caused by the nervous juices mixing with the blood, in the muscular part thereof; and these nervous juices are both derived from the blood, and forced into the muscular part of the heart, by the motion of the heart itself, the texture of the containing vessels, and perhaps by the pulsation of the arteries upon the nerves of the brain. Here now, the heart is the cause of the motion of the blood in the arteries; and the motion of the blood in the arteries urging their juices through the nerves, is the cause of the motion of the heart:

which is a plain circulation of mechanical powers, a perpetual motion, a thing unknown to nature! An epicurean cannot contrive a water machine, wherein the water should move the machine, and the machine move the water, and the same water continually return in a circle to move the machine.

Great God, it is thy immediate influence on the powers of nature in me that keeps my heart in motion. Oh, that I may love thee and serve thee with all my heart! In thee I live! to glorify thee, should be the business of my life.

Again, in all animals how small, how fine the organs! how indefinite the number of them! Sensation is performed by the mediation of organs arising from the brain, and continued through the part affected. Now there is not the least imaginable solid part of the vessels or muscles but what we find sensible; wherefore the number of organs that convey sensation must be inconceivable! Nutrition is also performed by organs, through which a supply is conveyed to the place to be nourished. Now there is no part of the body but what may be increased or lessened; so then in every individual point of the body there is the termination of organs, through which a nourishment may be conveyed. Furthermore, the canals do all augment, and may all decay; and therefore every assignable part of these canals must be the termination of some secretory duct, separating a fluid fit for the repairing of their losses, and these again must have others to repair their losses; and how shall we conceive where to stop? Moreover, the most exquisite glasses can discover nothing in the several parts of the vessels and muscles, but canals amazingly slender; the better the glasses,

the more of these capillary pipes are discovered. In short, all the solid parts of the body are nothing but either tubes to convey some fluid, or threads in bundles, tied by others that surround them, or going from one fibre to another, or spread into thin membranes ; but each of these how inconceivably minute the doctor does not scruple to say, infinitely!

O infinitely Great God, I am astonished! I am astonished! For those things hath my hand made, saith the Ird.

ESSAY XXVIII. Of REPTILES.

LET us now handle the reptiles, which are a sort of animals that rest one part of their body on the earth, while they advance the other forward.

In our way of doing it we shall take up serpents, and they shall not hurt us. The meanest of these, viz. the earth worm and the spiral motion of it, is admired as well as described by Dr. Tyson. The motion of reptiles is extremely curious. Their food and their nest lies in the next clod, plant, or hole; or they can long bear hunger and hardship. So their sinuous motion, performed with as much art as what is in the legs or wings of other crea tures, and as curiously provided for, is found sufficient for the conveying of them. There is abundance of geometrical neatness and niceness in the motion of serpents; their annular scales lie cross their belly, contrary to those in the back and the rest of the body: the edges also of the foremost scales lie over the edges of the following scales; and every scale has a distinct muscle, one end of which is tacked to the middle of the scale, the other to the upper edge of the following scale.

Snails have neither feet nor claws, but they creep with an undulating motion of their body; on which Dr. Lyster has written and by a slime emitted from their body, they adhere to all kinds of superfices.

The motive parts of caterpillars are admirably contrived, not only to serve their progression, but for gathering of their food. The spine, and muscles co-operating with the spine, in such as have bones; and the annular and other muscles in such as have none; are incomparable contrivances.

The magnitude whereto some serpents have grown, is prodigious. Bochart will astonish you with a collection of relations found in antiquity concerning serpents, and particularly dragons, of a most enormous magnitude. Gesner too will quote us authors for some so large, that the little book I am now writing will afford no room for them.

Yea, Suetonius affirms, that one was exposed by Augustus, which was no less than fifty cubits long. Dio comes up with him, and affirms, that in Hetruria there was one that was fourscore and five feet long, which, after he had made fearful devastations, was killed with a thunderbolt. Strabo out-does him, and affirms, that in Colo-Syria there had been one which was a hundred feet long, and so thick, that a couple of men on horseback, on each side of him, could not see one another. Yea, one that was an hundred and twenty feet long, was killed near Utica by the army of Regulus.

"Ye dragons, whose contagious breath

People the dark retreats of death,

Change your dire hissings into heavenly songs,
And praise your Maker with your forked tongues."

The poisonous tribes have been made an ob. jection against the divine providence, as being destructive to the rest of the world.

The poison of a viper is found by Dr. Mead, on a microscopical examination, a parcel of small salts, nimbly floating in the liquor, but quickly changed, and shot out into crystals, of an incredible tenuity and sharpness, with something like to knots here and there, from which they seemed to proceed: it lies in a bag in the gums, at the upper end of the teeth; these teeth are tubulated, for the conveyance of poison into the wound which they make. Galen says, mountebanks did use to stop these perforations of the teeth, before they would let spectators behold the vipers to bite them. Let it be considered, that the venomous creatures have their great medicinal uses; we see a treacle brought out of a viper; the viper's flesh cures leprosies and obstinate maladies. The gall of a rattle-snake (which we take out of him in the more early months of his yearly appearance, and work into troches with chalk or meal) is a rich cordial and anodyne, for which purpose I have often taken. it, and given it: it invigorates the blood into a mighty circulation, when fatal suppressions are upon it; it is highly alexipharmic, and cures quartan agues. And yet this rattle-snake, such a venomous wretch, that if he bite the edge of an axe, we have seen the bit of steel that has been bitten, come off immediately, as if it had been under a putrefaction.

The very steam of serpents in the famous La Grotta delli Serpi, at Sassa in Italy, celebrated by Wormius from Kircher, and strangely discovered by a leper happening to sleep there, does wonderous things.