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compressing parts of the water, then he is rendered less heavy, and immediately leaves the inferior parts of water, as being less weighty than the said profound parts." So that we see one principle of Dr. Gideon Harvey's philosophy is, that weight is partly occasioned by heat— that the same substance is heavier or lighter according as it is hotter or colder. The further explanation, in the like strain, of the reasons that nevertheless detain the body below for a considerable time after it may be supposed to have become as cold as the pressure of the water can well make it, need not be quoted at length ::-there still remain, it seems, certain "airy and fiery parts," after the vital flame has been extinguished, which it requires in most cases some days to overcome. A strong, compact, well-set man will be eight or nine days in ascending to the top, "because his heat was deeper, and in greater quantity impacted into his body;" and for the same reason, it is affirmed, such a man will sink sooner to the bottom, vanishing under water in the twinkling of an eye. "On the contrary," continues our author, we hear how that weak and tender women have fallen into the river, and have swam upon the water until watermen have rowed to them, and have taken them up; and many weakly women, that were suspected to be witches, being cast into the water for a trial, have been wickedly and wrongfully adjudged to be witches because they were long in sinking; and, alas, it is natural: the reason was, because they were comparatively light; for their earthy parts were not so much detained, and consequently moved not so forcibly downwards." "No doubt," it is added, with naïveté enough, “but their coats conduced also somewhat to it." "Whence I collect," concludes

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the demonstration, "that an ordinary woman is almost one-third longer descending to the bottom than an ordinary man, because a man, from being a third stronger (because he is a third heavier through the force of the light elements-but I mean not through fat or corpulency) than a woman, is conjectured` to have one-third more heat than a woman.' ""* But, if a woman has less heat than a man, she is, in the worthy doctor's opinion, still more decidedly his inferior in other respects, what heat she has, it should seem, being, after all, too much for the weakness of her general organization. "Women,” he afterwards observes, "die faster, that is, thicker than men, and are more disposed to sickness than they, because their innate heat and air do effect greater alterations upon their bodies, as having but little earth or compressing density, in comparison to men, to resist the light elements and moderate their irruptions; and, therefore, women seldom reach to any equal or consistent temperature, but are always in changing, which in them after eighteen, twenty, or twenty-four years' expiration is particularly called breaking, because then they alter so fast that they swiftly put a period to their days; and that, because their bodies being lax and porous, their innate heat shoots through in particles, and not in minimas, without which there can be no durable temperature. Were their bodies heavier and denser, the minimas of earth would divide their heat into minimas, and reduce it to a temperature. If, then, their innate heat doth constantly cohere in particles, and is never directed into minimas, it retaining in that case stronger force than otherwise it could do in minimas, it alterates their bodies * Arch. Philos. Nova, Part ii. p. 106.

Continually, and so they never attain to any consistency of age. Many sexagenarian widowers, or men of threescore years of age, do alter less and slower than most women do from their five-and-thirtieth year; wherefore they do rather covet a wife of twenty, because she will just last as long in her prime, or will be as fast in breaking, altering, and changing her temperament, form, and shape in one year as the old man shall alter or change in three or four years; and so they [the old man and his young wife] grow deformed in equal time. Wherefore a man's consistent age may last out the beauties of two or three women, one after the other; and, because of this, some in their mirth have proclaimed a woman after her thirty-fifth year to be fitter for an hospital than to continue a wife. No wonder if a woman be more fierce, furious, and of a more rash, swift judgment than a man ; for their spirits and heat, moving in great troops and confluences of particles, must needs move swift, which. swiftness of motion is the cause of their sudden rages, nimble tongues, and rash wits, &c. &c."* But our fair readers have probably had enough of this. From many other curious things in the multifarious miscellany, which comprises chemistry, botany, mineralogy, and other subjects besides those now usually included under the name of natural philosophy, we will transcribe a few sentences from what is laid down in various places on the matters that had most engaged the attention of inquirers for more than a century preceding the time of this writer, and in the elucidation of which the greatest progress had been made by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Des Cartes, and some of his own countrymen. The "old fancy of Py

*Arch. Philos. Nova, Part ii. p. 134.

thagoras, Plato, Aristarchus, Seleucus, Niceta, and others," the making the earth revolve around the sun, which had been in modern times revived by Copernicus, we have already seen that our author treats as a very absurd notion. "The earth is," he says, "and must necessarily be, the centre of the world, or of all the other elements, within which it is contained like the yolk of an egg within the white and the shell. I prove the proposition: if the nature of earth be to move conically from the circumference to its own centre through a contiguous gravity, and the nature of air and fire be to be equally diffused from the centre through their levity, ergo, the earth must needs fall to the midst of them all, its parts tending circularly and conically to their centre. The earth being arrived to the centre, it resteth quiet and immovable." 99% As for the position that the sun is the centre of the system, besides that it is in manifest contradiction to the language of Scripture, it cannot be true, we are told, for this, among other reasons: -"The sun is accounted by most, and proved by us, to be a fiery body, or a flame, and therefore is incapable of attaining to rest in a restless region, which, if it did, its flame would soon diminish through the continual rushing by of the fiery element, tearing its flames into a thousand parts, whose effects would certainly prove destructive to the whole universe, but especially to all living creatures." “The moon,” it is added, “is liker (if any) to be the centre, it consisting by far of more earth than the sun, as her minority in body, motion, and degree of brightness do testify."† Our author objects, moreover, *Arch. Philos. Nova, Part ii. p. 206.

† Id. p. 208.

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to the motion assigned to the earth by the Copernican hypothesis on a variety of grounds. In particular, he argues, it is incredibly rapid for so large and heavy a body. Again, were the earth a planet or star," he observes, "it is supposed it should cast a light, which is repugnant to its nature, through which, as I have showed before, she is rendered dark, and is the cause of all darkness. Were this absurdity admitted, all our knowledge which hitherto wise men have so laboured to accomplish would be in vain; for, as I said before, earth and earthy bodies must be light, fire and fiery bodies must be heavy, and enjoy their rest; water and waterish bodies must be likewise heavy; the air and airy bodies must be weighty, and enjoy their rest ; . . . all dark colours must be supposed light; all astronomical appearances, shadows; sounds, tastes, scents, and all mixed bodies must then be understood to be contrary to what really they are." In fine, he concludes, after quoting some passages to show that Scripture likewise, as well as common is plain against the earth's motion, "what need there more words to confute so absurd an opinion ?"* In a subsequent chapter on the tides, he objects altogether to the imagination entertained by Des Cartes, of the sun and moon having anything to do with that phenomenon, "I deny," he says, in the first place, "his supposition of the earth's motion, as being fabulous, which we have confuted elsewhere. He might as well assert that there be as many Neptunes under water moving it circularly, as Aristotle stated intelligences to move the heavens; for even this he might excuse by saying it was but an assumption to prove a phenomenon of the water." "Can any one rationally or probably conceive," Arch. Philos.. Nova, Part ii. p. 209.

sense,

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