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TO TIIE READER.

And now, since 1 have mentioned the Society, give me leave, worthyreader, as a member of that body which has been the chief promoter ofthis ensuing work, to vindicate (as I stand obliged) that afsembly, andconsequently the honour of his Majesty and the nation, in a particularwhich concerns it, though in appearance, a little foreign to the prefentsubject.

I will not say that all which I have written in the several paragraphsof this treatise is new; but that there are very many new and usefulthings and observations, (without insisting on the method only,) nothitherto delivered by any author, and so freely communicated, I hopewill sufficiently appear.. It is not therefore in behalf of any particularwhich concerns myself that I have been induced to enlarge this preface;but, by taking this occasion, to encounter the unsufferable boldnefs orambition of some persons, as well strangers as others, arrogating to them-selves the being inventors of divers new and useful experiments, justlyattributable to several members of the Royal Society *.

So far has that Afsembly been from affecting glory, that they seemrather to have declined their due; not as ashamed of .so numerous andfair an offspring; but as abundantly satisfied that, after all the hard mea-sure and virulent reproaches they had sustained for endeavouring, byunited attempts, and at their own charges, to improve real philosophy;they had, from time to time cultivated that province, in so many useful

* Consult the History of the Royal Society and their registers.-The laws of motion,

and the geometrical streightening of curve-lines, were first found out by Sir Christopher

Wren and Mr. Thomas Neile.-The equated isocrone motion of the weight of a circular

pendulum in a paraboloeid, for the regulating of clocks, and the improving pocket-watchesby springs applied to the balance, were first invented and demonstrated to this Society byDr. Hooke; together with all those new. and useful instruments, contrivances, and experi-ments, mathematical and physical, published in his posthumous works by the most accom-plished Mr. Waller, Secretary to the Royal Society ; and since,, thofe of the incomparablelearned Sir Isaac Newton, now President of the Royal Society ; Mr. Hailey, the worthyProfefsor of Geometry in the University of Oxford ; Dr. Grew, and several more, whoseworks and useful inventions sufficiently celebrate their merits. I do not mention theBarometer, to which might be added the prodigious effects of the Speculum Ustorium,surpafsing what the French confidently, or rather audaciously, pretend to; nor the otheradmirable inventions, injuriously arrogated by strangers, though due of right to English-men, and members of this Society;, for it is not the businefs of this preface to enumerateall, though it was necefsary to touch on some instances.