So as it should seem, that hitherto men are
rather beholden to a wild goat for surgery, or to a nightingale for
music, or to the ibis for some part of physic, or to the pot-lid
that flew open for artillery, or generally to chance or anything
else than to logic for the invention of arts and sciences. Neither
is the form of invention which Virgil describeth much other:
"Ut varias usus meditande extunderet artes
Paulatim."
For if you observe the words well, it is no other method than that
which brute beasts are capable of, and do put in ure; which is a
perpetual intending or practising some one thing, urged and imposed
by an absolute necessity of conservation of being. For so Cicero
saith very truly, Usus uni rei deditus et naturam et artem saepe
vincit. And therefore if it be said of men,
"Labor omnia vincit
Improbus, et duris urgens in rebus egestas,"
it is likewise said of beasts, Quis psittaco docuit suum ?a??e? Who
taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles into a hollow tree,
where she spied water, that the water might rise so as she might
come to it? Who taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea or
air, and to find the way from a field in a flower a great way off to
her hive? Who taught the ant to bite every grain of corn that she
burieth in her hill, lest it should take root and grow? Add then
the word extundere, which importeth the extreme difficulty, and the
word paulatim, which importeth the extreme slowness, and we are
where we were, even amongst the Egyptians' gods; there being little
left to the faculty of reason, and nothing to the duty or art, for
matter of invention.
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