I was at the mathematical school, where the master
taught his pupils after a method scarce imaginable
to us in Europe. The proposition, and demonstration,
were fairly written on a thin wafer, with ink composed
of a cephalic tincture. This, the student was
to swallow upon a fasting stomach, and for three days
following, eat nothing but bread and water. As
the wafer digested, the tincture mounted to his brain,
bearing the proposition along with it. But the
success has not hitherto been answerable, partly by
some error in the quantum or composition, and partly
by the perverseness of lads, to whom this bolus is
so nauseous, that they generally steal aside, and
discharge it upwards, before it can operate; neither
have they been yet persuaded to use so long an abstinence,
as the prescription requires.
[A further account of the academy. The author
proposes some improvements, which are honourably received.]
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill
entertained; the professors appearing, in my judgment,
wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that
never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy
people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs
to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom,
capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult
the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities,
eminent services; of instructing princes to know their
true interest, by placing it on the same foundation
with that of their people; of choosing for employments
persons qualified to exercise them, with many other
wild, impossible chimeras, that never entered before
into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in
me the old observation, “that there is nothing
so extravagant and irrational, which some philosophers
have not maintained for truth.”
But, however, I shall so far do justice to this part
of the Academy, as to acknowledge that all of them
were not so visionary. There was a most ingenious
doctor, who seemed to be perfectly versed in the whole
nature and system of government. This illustrious
person had very usefully employed his studies, in
finding out effectual remedies for all diseases and
corruptions to which the several kinds of public administration
are subject, by the vices or infirmities of those
who govern, as well as by the licentiousness of those
who are to obey. For instance: whereas
all writers and reasoners have agreed, that there is
a strict universal resemblance between the natural
and the political body; can there be any thing more
evident, than that the health of both must be preserved,
and the diseases cured, by the same prescriptions?
It is allowed, that senates and great councils are
often troubled with redundant, ebullient, and other
peccant humours; with many diseases of the head, and
more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous
contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands,
