produce not the effect which they were design’d for, but because the other parts also have a dependence upon them, put a stop to their motion likewise; and so the whole Instrument becomes unserviceable,, and not fit for any use.  This Instrument afterwards, by some shaking and tumbling, and throwing up and down, comes to have several of its parts shaken out, and several of its curious motions, and contrivances, and particles all fallen asunder; here a Pin falls out, and there a Pillar, and here a Wheel, and there a Hammer, and a Spring, and the like, and among the rest, away falls those parts also which were brused and disorder’d, and had all this while impeded the motion of all the rest; hereupon several of those other motions that yet remain, whole springs were not quite run down, being now at liberty, begin each of them to move, thus or thus, but quite after another method then before, there being many regulating parts and the like, fallen away and lost.  Upon this, the Owner, who chances to hear and observe some of these effects, being ignorant of the Watch-makers Art, wonders what is betid his Clock, and presently imagines that some Artist has been at work, and has set his Clock in order, and made a new kind of Instrument of it, but upon examining circumstances, he finds there was no such matter, but that the casual slipping out of a Pin had made several parts of his Clock fall to pieces, and that thereby the obstacle that all this while hindred his Clock, together with other usefull parts were fallen out, and so his Clock was set at liberty.  And upon winding up those springs again when run down, he finds his Clock to go, but quite after another manner then it was wont heretofore.

And thus may it be perhaps in the business of Moss, and Mould, and Mushroms, and several other spontaneous kinds of vegetations, which may be caus’d by a vegetative principle, which was a coadjutor to the life and growth of the greater Vegetable, and was by the destroying of the life of it stopt and impeded in performing its office; but afterwards, upon a further corruption of several parts that had all the while impeded it, the heat of the Sun winding up, as it were, the spring, sets it again into a vegetative motion, and this being single, and not at all regulated as it was before (when a part of that greater machine the pristine vegetable) is mov’d after quite a differing manner, and produces effects very differing from those it did before.

But this I propound onely as a conjecture, not that I am more enclin’d to this Hypothesis then the seminal, which upon good reason I ghess to be Mechanical also, as I may elsewhere more fully shew:  But because I may, by this, hint a possible way how this appearance may be solv’d; supposing we should be driven to confess from certain Experiments and Observations made, that such or such Vegetables were produc’d out of the corruption of another, without any concurrent seminal principle (as I have