Two Medico-Philosophical Discourses: On Fermentation

Preface.

...to the common understanding, and almost place them before the eyes, even into the hands themselves. Even unrefined and unlearned people can perceive, by the help of their senses, that particles of the substances I describe are present in things. Furthermore, the names of Sulfur, Salt, Spirit, and the rest are more familiarly known than matter and form original: materia & forma; these were the abstract, primary concepts in Scholastic philosophy used to explain the nature of all things, or the four principles of the Peripatetics original: Peripateticorum; a term for the followers of Aristotle, whose physics dominated universities at the time.

As for my method and way of reasoning, let no one find fault with me if I have not described everything here with perfect precision original: ad amussim; literally "by the mason's rule", or according to the strict rules of Logic original: Analytices. In this work, I have traveled through remote places like a wilderness where no footsteps have trodden, and where there is no guide or traveler. In such a place, I do not only make a journey, but I must also create the path itself. Therefore, wherever I may turn aside, fair judges of my effort will hardly say that I have wandered. I had no established path to follow, nor do I recognize any track that I could be accused of leaving behind.