Selected quad for the lemma: book_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
book_n	demonstration_n	proposition_n	quantity_n	1,827	5	13.9195	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A35976	A late discourse made in a solemne assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy : with instructions how to make the said powder : whereby many other secrets of nature are unfolded / by Sr. Kenelme Digby, knight ; rendred faithfully out of French into English by R. White.	Digby, Kenelm, Sir, 1603-1665.; White, R., Gent.	1658 (1658)	Wing D1435; ESTC R27859	54,616	164

doth tarnish it by degrees and although one should lock up his Chamber and come not thither a good while and keep it never so clean yet at his returne he will find a black kind of thin soot cover all his houshold-stuff as we see in Mills there is a white dust as also in Bakers shops which useth to whiten the walls and sometimes gets into cubboards and chests The said coal-soot also gets abroad and fouls cloths upon hedges as they are a drying as also in the Spring time the very leaves of trees are besooted therewith Now in regard that it is this air which the lungs draw for respiration among the inhabitans therefore the flegme and spittle which comes from them is commonly blackish and fuliginous Moreover the acrimony of this soot produceth another funestous effect for it makes the people subject to inflammations and by degrees to ulcerations in the lungs It is so corrosive and biting that if one put gammons of bacon or beef or or any other flesh within the chimney it so dries it up that it spoiles it Wherefore they who have weak lungs quickly feel it whence it comes to passe that almost the one half of them who dye in London dye of ptisical and pulmonicall distempers spitting commonly bloud from their ulcerated lungs But at the beginng of this malady the remedy is very easie It is but to send them to a place where the air is good many do usually come to Paris who have means to pay the charge of such a journy and they commonly use to recover their healths in perfection The same inconveniences are also though the operations be not so strong in the City of Liege where the common people burn no other than pit coals which they call h● ville Paris her self also although the circumambient be passing good yet is the subject to incommodities of that nature The excessively stinking dirt and channels of that vast City mingleth a great deal of ill allay with the purity of the air stuffing it every where with corrupted atoms which yet are not so pernicious as those of London We find that the most neat and polished silver plate exposed to the air becomes in a short time livid and foul which proceeds from no other cause then from those black atoms the true colour of putrefaction which stick unto them I know a person of quality and a singular friend of mine who is lodged in a place where on the one side a great many poor people do inhabit where few Carts use to passe and fewer Coaches his neighbours behind his house empty their filth and ordures in the middle of the street which useth hereby to be full of mounts of filth which is used to be carried away by Tombrells when they remove these ordures you cannot imagine what a stench and a kind of infectious air is smelt thereabout every where The servants of my said friend when this happens use to cover their plate and andirons of polished brasse with other of their fairest houshold-stuff with cotten or course bayes otherwise they would be all tarnished yet nothing hereof is seen within the air yet these experiences do manifestly convince that the air is stuffed with such atoms I cannot omit to adde hereunto another experiment which is that we find by the effects how the rayes of the Moon are cold and moist It is without controversie that the luminous parts of those rayes come from the Sun the Moon having no light at all within her as her ecclipses bear witnesse which happen when the earth is opposite twixt her and the Sun which interposition hinders her to have light from his rayes The beams then which come from the Moon are those of the Sun who glancing upon her reflect upon us and so bring with them the atoms of that cold and humid star who participate of the source whence they come therefore if one should expose a hollow bason or glasse to assemble them one shall find that whereas those of the Sun do burn by such a conjuncture these clean contrary do refresh and moysten in a notable manner leaving an aquatick and viscuous glutining kind of sweat upon the glasse One would think it were a folly that one should offer to wash his hands in a well polished silver bason wherein there is not a drop of water yet this may be done by the reflection of the Moon beams onely which will afford a competent humidity to do it but they wo have tryed this have found their hands after they are wiped to be much moister than usually but this is an infallible way to take away warts from the bands if it be often used Let us then conclude out of these premises and experiments that the air is full of atoms which are drawn from bodies by means of the light which reflects thereon or which sally out by the interior natural heat of those bodies which drive them forth It may haply seem impossible that there can be an emanation of so many small bodies that should be spread up and down the air and be so carried up and down and so far by a continual flux if I may say so and yet the body whence they come receives no diminution that is perceptible though sometimes t is visible enough as by the evaporations of the spirits of wine musk and other such volatil substances But this objection will be null and the two precedent principles will render themselves more credible when we shall settle another viz. That every body be it never so little is divisible ad infinitum not that it hath infinite parts for the contrary thereof may be demonstrated but it is capable to be divided and subdivided into new parts without ever coming to the end of the division And it is in this sense that our Masters teach us that quantity is infinitly divisible This is evident to him who shall consider with a profound imagination the essence and the formal reason of quantity which is nothing else but divisibility But in regard that this speculation is very subtile and metaphysical I will serve my self with some geometricall demonstrations to prove this truth for they accommodate best with the imagination Euclide doth teach us in the tenth Proposition of his sixth book that if one take a short line and another long one and that the long be divided to divers equall parts twixt themselves The little one may be divided also into as many equal parts among themselves and every one of those parts also in others and these last into so many more and so consecutively without being able ever to come to that which is not divisible But le ts suppose although it be impossible that one might divide and subdivide a line so that at last we should come to an indivisible and le ts see what will come of it I say then that since the line doth resolve it self into indivisibles she ought to be composed of them le ts see whether that may