rnal
principles of heat, useth to transpire, breathe out, and waste away
through invisible pores, by exercise, motion, and sleep, to make room
still for a supply of new nurriture: I fell, I say, to consider
whether our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this
Bucentoro, which, tho it be reputed still the same vessel, yet I
believe there's not a foot of that timber remaining which it had upon
the first dock, having been, as they tell me, so often planked and
ribbed, caulked and pieced.

In like manner, our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new
sustenance, which begets new blood, and consequently new spirits, new
humors, and, I may say, new flesh; the old, by continual deperdition
and insensible perspirations, evaporating still out of us, and giving
way to fresh; so that I make a question whether, by reason of these
perpetual reparations and accretions, the body of man may be said to
be the same numerical body in his old age that he had in his manhood,
or the same in his manhood that he had in his youth, the same in his
youth that he carried about with him in his childhood, or the same in
his childhood which he wore first in the womb. I make a doubt whether
I had the same identical, individually numerical body, when I carried
a calf-leather satchel to school in Hereford, as when I wore a
lambskin hood in Oxford; or whether I have the same mass of blood in
my veins, and the same flesh, now in Venice, which I carried about me
three years since, up and down London streets, having, in lieu of beer
and ale, drunk wine all this while, and fed upon different viands.
Now, the stomach is like a crucible, for it hath a chemical kind of
virtue to transmute one body into another, to transsubstantiate fish
and fruits into flesh within and about us; but tho it be questionable
whether I wear the same flesh which is fluxible, I am sure my hair is
not the same, for you may remember I went flaxen-haired out of
England, but you shall find me returned with a very dark brown, which
I impute not only to the heat and air of those hot countries I have
eat my bread in, but to the quality and difference of food: you will
say that hair is but an excrementitious thing, and makes not to this
purpose; moreover, methinks I hear thee say that this may be true only
in the blood and spirits, or such fluid parts, not in the solid and
heterogeneal parts.

But I will press no further at this time this philosophical notion,
which the s