Admirable Minerva seems to bend her course to all the nations of
the earth, and reacheth from end to end mightily, that she may
reveal herself to all mankind. We see that she has already
visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks,
the Arabs and the Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and now
has happily come to Britain, the most noble of islands, nay,
rather a microcosm in itself, that she may show herself a debtor
both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians. At which wondrous
sight it is conceived by most men, that as philosophy is now
lukewarm in France, so her soldiery are unmanned and languishing.


CHAPTER X

OF THE GRADUAL PERFECTING OF BOOKS

While assiduously seeking out the wisdom of the men of old,
according to the counsel of the Wise Man (Eccles. xxxix.): The
wise man, he says, will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients,
we have not thought fit to be misled into the opinion that the
first founders of the arts have purged away all crudeness,
knowing that the discoveries of each of the faithful, when
weighed in a faithful balance, makes a tiny portion of science,
but that by the anxious investigations of a multitude of
scholars, each as it were contributing his share, the mighty
bodies of the sciences have grown by successive augmentations to
the immense bulk that we now behold. For the disciples,
continually melting down the doctrines of their masters, and
passing them again through the furnace, drove off the dross that