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GIOVANNI ALFONSO BORELLI

AT PISA

Most Celebrated Professor of Mathematics

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SUCH is the obscurity and difficulty found in discovering physical matters, that it seems our senses are not entirely able to determine anything with complete certainty. Although we may be persistent in our relentless labor, contemplating Mother Nature in her hidden places—as if in a volume written in mysteries—and though we attempt to uncover even darker secrets within the excavated organs organsoriginal: "visceribus"; the internal organs of the body. of living creatures, we eventually gather from our efforts that the truth is established only through the immense weariness of long observations. Meanwhile, by studying now insectsoriginal: "insectorum"; Malpighi frequently used simpler organisms like silkworms to understand complex biological systems., and now more complex animals, we borrow light, as if climbing by degrees. For Nature is accustomed to play out her great and perfectly finished designs original: "omnibus numeris absolutis" — a Latin idiom meaning "complete in every detail." in certain humbler creatures, and to place the beginnings of complex animals within simpler ones.

To come closer to the matter at hand, most distinguished Sir, there were two things that I left as doubts in my previous letter on the observations of the lungs, to be investigated with more exact study. The first was what that described network might be, by which the individual vesiclesoriginal: "vesicae"; the tiny air sacs in the lungs we now call alveoli. and cavities are in a way bound together in the lungs; the other was whether the vessels of the lungs...