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40 - . TO THE READER.

This structure then being thus ruinous and crazy, it is obvious whatthey were to do; even the same which skilful architects do every daybefore us; by pulling down the decayed and sinking wall, to erect a"better and more substantial in its place. They not only take down theold, reject the uselefs and decayed, but sever such materials as are solid,and will serve again; bring new ones in, prepare and frame a modelsuitable to so magnificent a design: This Solomon did in order to thebuilding of the material temple; and this is here to be pursued in theintellectual: Nay, here was abundance of rubbish to be cleared, that thearea might be free; and then was the foundation to be deeply searched,the materials accurately examined, squared, and adjusted before it couldbe laid: Nor was this the labour of a few; lefs than a much longer time,more cost and encouragement than any which the Society has yet metwithal, could not in reason be sufficient effectually to go through sochargeable a work, and highly necefsary. -

A long time it was they had been surveying the decays of what wasready now to drop in pieces. Whatever show the outside made wdth anoise of elements and qualities, occult and evident, abhorrence of vacuum,sympathies, antipathies, substantial forms, and prime matter courtingform; epicycles, Ptolemean hypothefis, magisterial definitions, peremptorymaxims, speculative and positive doctrines, and alti-sonant phrases, with-a thousand other precarious and unintelligible notions, (all which theyhave been turning over to see if they could find any thing sincere and.useful among this pedantic rubbish, but in vain,) here was nothing,material, nothing of moment, mathematical or mechanical, and which hadnot been miserably sophisticated, on which to lay the strefs; nothing ina manner whereby any farther progrefs could be made, for the raisingand ennobling the dignity of mankind in the sublimest operations of therational faculty, by clearing the obfcurities, and healing the defects ofmost of the physiological hypotheses, repugnant, as they hitherto seemedto be, to the principles of real knowledge and experience.

Now, although it was neither in their hopes or in their prospect toconsummate a design requiring fo mighty aids, environed as they havebeen with these prejudices, yet have they not desisted from the enterprize *but rather than so noble and illustrious an undertaking should not proceedfor want of some generous and industrious spirits to promote the work,,they have themselves submitted to those mean employments of digging?