Page:The Sceptical Chymist.djvu/60

36 of compound Bodies, which I may possibly hereafter be able to confute.

And that you may the more easily Examine, and the better Judge of what I have to say, I shall cast it into a pretty number of distinct Propositions, to which I shall not premise any thing; because I take it for granted, that you need not be advertis’d, that much of what I am to deliver, whether for or against a determinate number of Ingredients of mixt Bodies, may be indifferently apply’d to the four Peripatetick Elements, and the three Chymical Principles, though divers of my Objections will more peculiarly belong to these last nam’d, because the Chymical Hypothesis seeming to be much more countenanc’d by Experience then the other, it will be expedient to insist chiefly upon the disproving of that; especially since most of the Arguments that are imploy’d against it, may, by a little variation, be made to conclude, at least as strongly against the less plausible, Aristotelian Doctrine.

To proceed then to my Propositions, I shall begin with this. That