is to be allowed, which laboureth to make doubtful things certain, and not those which labour to make certain things doubtful.  Therefore these calendars of doubts I commend as excellent things; so that there he this caution used, that when they be thoroughly sifted and brought to resolution, they be from thenceforth omitted, discarded, and not continued to cherish and encourage men in doubting.  To which calendar of doubts or problems I advise be annexed another calendar, as much or more material which is a calendar of popular errors:  I mean chiefly in natural history, such as pass in speech and conceit, and are nevertheless apparently detected and convicted of untruth, that man’s knowledge be not weakened nor embased by such dross and vanity.  As for the doubts or non liquets general or in total, I understand those differences of opinions touching the principles of nature, and the fundamental points of the same, which have caused the diversity of sects, schools, and philosophies, as that of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, and the rest.  For although Aristotle, as though he had been of the race of the Ottomans, thought he could not reign except the first thing he did he killed all his brethren; yet to those that seek truth and not magistrality, it cannot but seem a matter of great profit, to see before them the several opinions touching the foundations of nature.  Not for any exact truth that can be expected in those theories; for as the same phenomena in astronomy are satisfied by this received astronomy of the diurnal motion, and the proper motions of the planets, with their eccentrics and epicycles, and likewise by the theory of Copernicus, who supposed the earth to move, and the calculations are indifferently agreeable to both, so the ordinary face and view of experience is many times satisfied by several theories and philosophies; whereas to find the real truth requireth another manner of severity and attention.  For as Aristotle saith, that children at the first will call every woman mother, but afterward they come to distinguish according to truth, so experience, if it be in childhood, will call every philosophy mother, but when it cometh to ripeness it will discern the true mother.  So as in the meantime it is good to see the several glosses and opinions upon Nature, whereof it may be everyone in some one point hath seen clearer than his fellows, therefore I wish some collection to be made painfully and understandingly de antiquis philosophiis, out of all the possible light which remaineth to us of them:  which kind of work I find deficient.  But here I must give warning, that it be done distinctly and severedly; the philosophies of everyone throughout by themselves, and not by titles packed and faggoted up together, as hath been done by Plutarch.  For it is the harmony of a philosophy in itself, which giveth it light and credence; whereas if it be singled and broken, it will seem more foreign and dissonant.  For as when I read in Tacitus the actions of Nero