[Footnote 28:  “Metallographia:  or, An History of Metals.  Wherein is declared the signs of Ores and Minerals both before and after digging, the causes and manner of their generations, their kinds, sorts and differences; with the description of sundry new Metals or Semi-Metals, and many other things pertaining to Mineral knowledge.  As also, the handling and shewing of their Vegetability, and the discussion of the most difficult Questions belonging to Mystical Chymistry, as of the Philosophers Gold, their Mercury, the Liquor Alkahest, Aurum potabile, and such like.  Gathered forth of the most approved Authors that have written in Greek, Latine, or High Dutch; With some Observations and Discoveries of the Author himself.  By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick and Chirurgery.  Qui principia naturalia in seipso ignoraverit, hic jam multum remotus est ab arte nostra, quoniam non habet radicem veram supra quam intentionem suam fundet.  Geber.  Sum. perfect. l. c. i. p. 21.

Sed non ante datur telluris operta subire,
Auricomos quam quis discerpserit arbore foetus.
Virg. AEneid. l. 6.

London, Printed by A.C. for Walter Kettilby at the Bishops-Head in Duck-lane, 1671, 4to.”]

[Footnote 29:  Dr. Whitaker’s assertion, that Webster was “neglected alike by the wise and unwise,” seems to be a mere gratis dictum.  The age of folios was rapidly passing away; but few folios of the period appear to have been more generally read, if we are to judge at least from its being frequently mentioned and quoted, than Webster’s Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft.  The same able writer’s “Doubt whether Sir Matthew Hale ever read Webster’s Discovery of Supposed Witchcraft,” might easily have been satisfied by a reference to any common life of that great judge, which would have shown the historian of Whalley that Hale died before the book was published.  Nor is Dr. Whitaker correct in stating that all tradition of Webster is now lost in the neighbourhood where he resided.  The following anecdote, which would have delighted him, I had from an old inhabitant of Burnley, to whom it had been handed down by his grandfather:—­In the days of Webster’s fanaticism, during the usurpation, he is stated, in the zealous crusade then so common against superstitious relics, to have headed a party by whom the three venerable crosses, now set up in the churchyard of Whalley, commonly called the Crosses of Paulinus, and supposed to be coeval with the first preaching of Christianity in the North of England, were removed and taken away from their site and appropriated as a boundary fence for some adjoining fields.  After the Restoration, and when his religious views had become sobered and settled, he is said, in an eager desire to atone for the desecration of which he had been guilty, to have purchased the crosses from the person who was then in possession of them, and to have been at the cost of re-erecting them on their