Page:History of the Royal Society.djvu/102

that the Royal Society has enough already: But rather to encourage them to cast in more Help; by shewing them, what Return may be made from a little, by a wise Administration.

 

Sect. X.
Their Instruments.Of the Variety and Excellence of the Instruments, which it lyes in their Power to use, I will give no other Proof, than the wonderful Perfection to which all manual Arts have of late Years arrived. Men now generally understand, to employ those very Tools which the Antients lent us, to infinite more Works than formerly; they have also of late devis'd a great Multitude of all Sorts, which were before unknown; and besides we may very well expect, that Time will every Day bring forth more. For according as the Matter to work upon does abound, the greater Plenty of Instruments must by Consequence follow; such a Connexion there is between Inventions, and the Means of inventing, that they mutually increase each other.

 

I might be as large, as I pleased, in this Particular; in running through some Part of all the innumerable Arts of the western World; and it were not difficult to shew, that the ordinary Shops of Mechanicks are now as full of Rarities, as the Cabinets of the former noblest Mathematicians. But I will leave that Subject, which is so familiar to all, and choose rather to fetch a Confirmation of this, even from those Countries, which (after the Manner of the Antients} we call barbarous. And in going thither for an Example, I have a farther End. In my foregoing Discourse, I tried to make out the Advantages of the modern Times above the antient; by following the Progress of Learning, down through their Tracts, to which Scho-