(5) In the consideration of the cures of diseases, I find a deficience in the receipts of propriety, respecting the particular cures of diseases:  for the physicians have frustrated the fruit of tradition and experience by their magistralities, in adding and taking out and changing quid pro qua in their receipts, at their pleasures; commanding so over the medicine, as the medicine cannot command over the disease.  For except it be treacle and mithridatum, and of late diascordium, and a few more, they tie themselves to no receipts severely and religiously.  For as to the confections of sale which are in the shops, they are for readiness and not for propriety.  For they are upon general intentions of purging, opening, comforting, altering, and not much appropriate to particular diseases.  And this is the cause why empirics and old women are more happy many times in their cures than learned physicians, because they are more religious in holding their medicines.  Therefore here is the deficience which I find, that physicians have not, partly out of their own practice, partly out of the constant probations reported in books, and partly out of the traditions of empirics, set down and delivered over certain experimental medicines for the cure of particular diseases, besides their own conjectural and magistral descriptions.  For as they were the men of the best composition in the state of Rome, which either being consuls inclined to the people, or being tribunes inclined to the senate; so in the matter we now handle, they be the best physicians, which being learned incline to the traditions of experience, or being empirics incline to the methods of learning.

(9) In preparation of medicines I do find strange, specially considering how mineral medicines have been extolled, and that they are safer for the outward than inward parts, that no man hath sought to make an imitation by art of natural baths and medicinable fountains:  which nevertheless are confessed to receive their virtues from minerals; and not so only, but discerned and distinguished from what particular mineral they receive tincture, as sulphur, vitriol, steel, or the like; which nature, if it may be reduced to compositions of art, both the variety of them will be increased, and the temper of them will be more commanded.

(10) But lest I grow to be more particular than is agreeable either to my intention or to proportion, I will conclude this part with the note of one deficience more, which seemeth to me of greatest consequence:  which is, that the prescripts in use are too compendious to attain their end; for, to my understanding, it is a vain and flattering opinion to think any medicine can be so sovereign or so happy, as that the receipt or miss of it can work any great effect upon the body of man.  It were a strange speech which spoken, or spoken oft, should reclaim a man from a vice to which he were by nature subject.  It is order, pursuit, sequence, and interchange of application,