as great a quantity, as may be found by praecipitations,
though not so easily by the sight or taste;
so the Air, which seems to be but as ’twere
a tincture or saline substance, dissolv’d
and agitated by the fluid and agil AEther, may
disperse and expand it self into a vast
space, if it have room enough, and infect, as it
were, every part of that space. But, as on the
other side, if there be but some few grains
of the liquor, it may extract all the colour
of the tinging substance, and may dissolve
all the Salt, and thereby become much more impregnated
with those substances, so may all the air that
sufficed in a rarfy’d state to fill some
hundred thousand spaces of AEther, be compris’d
in only one, but in a position proportionable
dense. And though we have not yet found
out such strainers for Tinctures and Salts
as we have for the Air, being yet unable to separate
them from their dissolving liquors by any kind of
filtre, without praecipitation, as we
are able to separate the Air from the AEther
by Glass, and several other bodies. And
though we are yet unable and ignorant of the ways of
praecipitating Air out of the AEther as we can
Tinctures, and Salts out of several dissolvents;
yet neither of these seeming impossible from
the nature of the things, nor so improbable
but that some happy future industry may find out ways
to effect them; nay, further, since we find that Nature
does really perform (though by what means we
are not certain) both these actions, namely, by praecipitating
the Air in Rain and Dews, and by supplying the Streams
and Rivers of the World with fresh water, strain’d
through secret subterraneous Caverns: And since,
that in very many other proprieties they do
so exactly seem of the same nature; till
further observations or tryals do inform us of the
contrary, we may safely enough conclude
them of the same kind. For it seldom happens
that any two natures have so many properties coincident
or the same, as I have observ’d Solutions
and Air to have, and to be different in the
rest. And therefore I think it neither impossible,
irrational, nay nor difficult to be
able to predict what is likely to happen
in other particulars also, besides those which Observation
or Experiment have declared thus or thus; especially,
if the circumstances that do often very much
conduce to the variation of the effects be duly weigh’d
and consider’d. And indeed, were
there not a probability of this, our inquiries
would be endless, our tryals vain, and
our greatest inventions would be nothing but
the meer products of chance, and not
of Reason; and, like Mariners in an Ocean,