besides hail, wind, snow, thunder, lightning, &c., those strange fireworks, devilish petards, and such like warlike machinations derived hence, of which read Tartalea and others.  Ernestus Burgravius, a disciple of Paracelsus, hath published a discourse, in which he specifies a lamp to be made of man’s blood, Lucerna vitae et mortis index, so he terms it, which chemically prepared forty days, and afterwards kept in a glass, shall show all the accidents of this life; si lampus hic clarus, tunc homo hilaris et sanus corpore et animo; si nebulosus et depressus, male afficitur, et sic pro statu hominis variatur, unde sumptus sanguis; [3365]and which is most wonderful, it dies with the party, cum homine perit, et evanescit, the lamp and the man whence the blood was taken, are extinguished together.  The same author hath another tract of Mumia (all out as vain and prodigious as the first) by which he will cure most diseases, and transfer them from a man to a beast, by drawing blood from one, and applying it to the other, vel in plantam derivare, and an Alexi-pharmacum, of which Roger Bacon of old in his Tract. de retardanda senectute, to make a man young again, live three or four hundred years.  Besides panaceas, martial amulets, unguentum armarium, balsams, strange extracts, elixirs, and such like magico-magnetical cures.  Now what so pleasing can there be as the speculation of these things, to read and examine such experiments, or if a man be more mathematically given, to calculate, or peruse Napier’s Logarithms, or those tables of artificial [3366]sines and tangents, not long since set out by mine old collegiate, good friend, and late fellow-student of Christ Church in Oxford, [3367]Mr. Edmund Gunter, which will perform that by addition and subtraction only, which heretofore Regiomontanus’s tables did by multiplication and division, or those elaborate conclusions of his [3368]sector, quadrant, and cross-staff.  Or let him that is melancholy calculate spherical triangles, square a circle, cast a nativity, which howsoever some tax, I say with [3369]Garcaeus, dabimus hoc petulantibus ingeniis, we will in some cases allow:  or let him make an ephemerides, read Suisset the calculator’s works, Scaliger de emendatione temporum, and Petavius his adversary, till he understand them, peruse subtle Scotus and Suarez’s metaphysics, or school divinity, Occam, Thomas, Entisberus, Durand, &c.  If those other do not affect him, and his means be great, to employ his purse and fill his head, he may go find the philosopher’s stone; he may apply his mind, I say, to heraldry, antiquity, invent impresses, emblems; make epithalamiums, epitaphs, elegies, epigrams, palindroma epigrammata, anagrams, chronograms, acrostics, upon his friends’ names; or write a comment on Martianus Capella, Tertullian de pallio, the Nubian geography, or upon Aelia Laelia Crispis, as many idle fellows have essayed; and rather than do nothing, vary a [3370]verse a thousand