, trivial and poor;--all these have contributed
to supply the understanding with very bad materials for philosophy and
the sciences.

Then an attempt is made to mend the matter by a preposterous subtlety
and winnowing of argument. But this comes too late, the case being
already past remedy; and is far from setting the business right
or sifting away the errors. The only hope therefore of any greater
increase or progress lies in a reconstruction of the sciences.

Of this reconstruction the foundation must be laid in natural history,
and that of a new kind and gathered on a new principle. For it is
in vain that you polish the mirror if there are no images to be
reflected; and it is as necessary that the intellect should be
supplied with fit matter to work upon, as with safeguards to guide its
working. But my history differs from that in use (as my logic does) in
many things,--in end and office, in mass and composition, in subtlety,
in selection also and setting forth, with a view to the operations
which are to follow.

For first, the object of a natural history which I propose is not so
much to delight with variety of matter or to help with present use of
experiments, as to give light to the discovery of causes and supply a
suckling philosophy with its first food. For though it be true that
I am principally in pursuit of works and the active department of the
sciences, yet I wait for harvest-time, and do not attempt to mow
the moss or to reap the green corn. For I well know that axioms once
rightly discovered will carry whole troops of works along with them,
and produce them, not here and there one, but in clusters. And that
unseasonable and puerile hurry to snatch by way of earnest at the
first works which come within reach, I utterly condemn and reject, as
an Atalanta's apple that hinders the race. Such then is the office of
this natural history of mine.

Next, with regard to the mass and composition of it: I mean it to be a
history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to
her own course and does her work her own way)--such as that of
the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants,
animals,--but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that
is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her
natural state, and squeezed and moulded. Therefore I set down at
length all experiments of the mechanical arts, of the operative part
of the liberal arts, of the many crafts