Micrographia - Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon by Robert Hooke
page 199 of 465 (42%)
page 199 of 465 (42%)
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at c, c, c, which has discovered to me a further resemblance they have to
Eggs, they having an appearance of a white and yelk, by two differing substances that envelope and encompass each other. That which we may call the white was pretty whitish neer the yelk, but more duskie towards the shell; some of them I could plainly perceive to be shot or radiated like a _Pyrites_ or _fire-stone_; the yelk in some I saw hollow, in others fill'd with a duskie brown and porous substance like a kind of pith. The small pores, or _interstitia_ eeee betwixt the Globules, I plainly saw, and found by other trials to be every way pervious to air and water, for I could blow through a piece of this stone of a considerable thickness, as easily as I have blown through a Cane, which minded me of the pores which _Des Cartes_ allow his _materia subtilis_ between the _æthereal_ globules. The object, through the _Microscope_, appears like a _Congeries_ or heap of Pibbles, such as I have often seen cast up on the shore, by the working of the Sea after a great storm, or like (in shape, though not colour) a company of small Globules of Quicksilver, look'd on with a _Microscope_, when reduc'd into that form by the way lately mentioned. And perhaps, this last may give some hint at the manner of the formation of the former: For supposing some _Lapidescent_ substance to be generated, or some way brought (either by some commixture of bodies in the Sea it self, or protruded in, perhaps, out of some _subterraneous_ caverns) to the bottom of the Sea, and there remaining in the form of a liquor like Quicksilver, _heterogeneous_ to the ambient _Saline_ fluid, it may by the working and tumblings of the Sea to and fro be jumbled and comminuted into such Globules as may afterwards be hardned into Flints, the lying of which one upon another, when in the Sea, being not very hard, by reason of the weight of the |
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