n_, will not be more strange than one
to America. To them that come after us, it may be as
ordinary to _buy a pair of wings_ to fly into remotest
regions, as now _a pair of boots_ to ride a journey. And to
confer at the distance of the Indies, by _sympathetic
conveyances_, may be as usual to future times, as to us in a
literary correspondence. The restoration of _grey hairs to
juvenility_, and renewing the _exhausted marrow_, may at
length, be effected without a miracle; and the turning the
now-comparative _desert world_ into a _paradise_, may not
improbably be expected from late _agriculture_.

"Those that judge by the narrowness of former principles and
successes, will smile at these paradoxical expectations. But
the great inventions of latter ages, which altered the face of
all things, in their naked proposals and mere suppositions,
were to former times as ridiculous. To have talked of a new
earth to have been discovered, had been a romance to
antiquity; and to sail without sight of stars or shores, by
the guidance of a mineral, a story more absurd than the
flight of Daedalus. That men should speak after their tongues
were ashes, or communicate with each other in differing
hemispheres, before the invention of letters, could not but
have been thought a fiction. Antiquity would not have
believed the almost incredible force of our cannons, and
would as coldly have entertained the wonders of the
telescope."--GLANVILL, _Scepsis Scientifica_, p. 133.

[256] Evelyn, whose elegant mind, one would have imagined, had been
little susceptible of such vehement anger, in the preface
to his "Sylva," scolds at no common rate: "Well-meaning
people are led away by the noise of a few ignorant and
comical buffoons, who, with an insolence suitable to their
understanding, are still crying out, _What have the Society
done?_" He attributes all the opposition and ridicule the
Society encountered to a personage not usual to be introduced
into a philosophical controversy--"The Enemy of Mankind." But
it was well to denounce the devil himself, as the Society had
nearly lost the credit of fearing him. Evelyn insists that
"next to the propagation of our most ho