res from the heat of a scorching sun. It begirdeth
and encompasseth forests, chases, parks, copses, and groves, for the
pleasure of hunters. It descendeth into the salt and fresh of both sea and
river-waters for the profit of fishers. By it are boots of all sizes,
buskins, gamashes, brodkins, gambadoes, shoes, pumps, slippers, and every
cobbled ware wrought and made steadable for the use of man. By it the butt
and rover-bows are strung, the crossbows bended, and the slings made fixed.
And, as if it were an herb every whit as holy as the vervain, and reverenced
by ghosts, spirits, hobgoblins, fiends, and phantoms, the bodies of deceased
men are never buried without it.

I will proceed yet further. By the means of this fine herb the invisible
substances are visibly stopped, arrested, taken, detained, and
prisoner-like committed to their receptive gaols. Heavy and ponderous
weights are by it heaved, lifted up, turned, veered, drawn, carried, and
every way moved quickly, nimbly, and easily, to the great profit and
emolument of humankind. When I perpend with myself these and such-like
marvellous effects of this wonderful herb, it seemeth strange unto me how
the invention of so useful a practice did escape through so many by-past
ages the knowledge of the ancient philosophers, considering the inestimable
utility which from thence proceeded, and the immense labour which without it
they did undergo in their pristine elucubrations. By virtue thereof,
through the retention of some aerial gusts, are the huge rambarges, mighty
galleons, the large floats, the Chiliander, the Myriander ships launched
from their stations and set a-going at the pleasure and arbitrament of their
rulers, conders, and steersmen. By the help thereof those remote nations
whom nature seemed so unwilling to have discovered to us, and so desirous to
have kept them still in abscondito and hidden from us, that the ways through
which their countries were to be reached unto were not only totally unknown,
but judged also to be altogether impermeable and inaccessible, are now
arrived to us, and we to them.

Those voyages outreached flights of birds and far surpassed the scope of
feathered fowls, how swift soever they had been on the wing, and
notwithstanding that advantage which they have of us in swimming through
the air. Taproban hath seen the heaths of Lapland, and both the Javas and
Riphaean mountains; wide distant Phebol shall see Theleme, and the
Isl