what is called chance
contributed very much to the discovery of America; at least it has
been always thought that Christopher Columbus undertook his voyage
merely on the relation of a captain of a ship which a storm had driven
as far westward as the Caribbean Island. Be this as it will, men had
sailed round the world, and could destroy cities by an artificial
thunder more dreadful than the real one; but, then, they were not
acquainted with the circulation of the blood, the weight of the air,
the laws of motions, light, the number of our planets, etc. And a man
who maintained a thesis on Aristotle's "Categories," on the universals
_a parte rei_, or such-like nonsense, was looked upon as a prodigy.

The most astonishing, the most useful inventions, are not those which
reflect the greatest honor on the human mind. It is to a mechanical
instinct, which is found in many men, and not to true philosophy that
most arts owe their origin.

The discovery of fire, the art of making bread, of melting and
preparing metals, of building houses, and the invention of the shuttle
are infinitely more beneficial to mankind than printing or the sea
compass; and yet these arts were invented by uncultivated, savage men.

What a prodigious use the Greeks and Romans made afterward of
mechanics! Nevertheless, they believed that there were crystal
heavens, that the stars were small lamps which sometimes fell into the
sea, and one of their greatest philosophers, after long researches,
found that the stars were so many flints which had been detached from
the earth.

In a word, no one before Lord Bacon was acquainted with experimental
philosophy, nor with the several physical experiments which have been
made since his time. Scarce one of them but is hinted at in his work,
and he himself had made several. He made a kind of pneumatic engine,
by which he guessed the elasticity of the air. He approached on all
sides, as it were, to the discovery of its weight, and had very near
attained it, but some time after Torricelli seized upon this truth. In
a little time experimental philosophy began to be cultivated on a
sudden in most parts of Europe. It was a hidden treasure which Lord
Bacon had some notion of, and which all the philosophers, encouraged
by his promises, endeavored to dig up.

But that which surprized me most was to read in his work, in express
terms, the new attraction, the invention of which is ascribed to Sir
Isaac Newton.

We must se