[81] “It is the fashion to talk as if art were something different from nature, or a sort of addition to nature, with power to finish what nature has begun, or correct her when going aside. In truth, man has no power over nature except that of motion—the power, I say, of putting natural bodies together, or separating them—the rest is done by nature within.” Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, circ. 1612. Man (e.g.) as the modern writer puts it, “can bring together the radium and the bouillon, but the radiobe, whatever it may be, is none the less a product of nature.” “The art itself is nature.”
[82] Unfortunately, however, Bacon’s instances are far from satisfactory. “We see,” he says, “that in living creatures, that come of putrefaction, there is much transmutation of one into another; as caterpillars turn into flies, etc. And it should seem probable, that whatsoever creature, having life, is generated without seed, that creature will change out of one species into another.” And so forth.
[83] Judge Webb does not refer to Bacon’s remarks on the coloration of flowers which I have thought worth citing, but he quotes the Natural History to the effect that “if you can get a scion to grow upon a stock of another kind” it “may make the fruit greater, though it is like it will make the fruit baser.” But this is not much of a “parallel” with the remark of Polixenes as to marrying “a gentler scion to the wildest stock,” etc.
[84] Country Matters in Short, by W. F. Collier, p. 21.
[85] See also his remarks on the saying “homo est planta inversa,” Cent. VII, 607, and compare Burton, Anat: of Melancholy, vol. 2, p. 193. Ed. 1800. The scientific facts with regard to sex-difference in the vegetable world were not discovered till some seventy years after Shakspere’s death.
[86] At the same time we must take note, that Bacon’s theory of the flamy substance of which the stars are supposed to consist, seems to differ not a little from the modern conception of matter in a state of combustion or incandescence. See Abbott’s Life of Bacon, pp. 374-5.
[87] Sir Edward Sullivan, who appears to have been captivated by Signor Paolo Orano’s quite untenable theory that Hamlet is meant for Giordano-Bruno, makes a truly remarkable comment upon the second of the lines above-quoted, viz.: “Doubt that the sun doth move.” He says this line “is the Copernican System in little”! It is, of course, the very opposite. It is the Ptolemaic System in little! (See Sir E. Sullivan in The Nineteenth Century, February, 1918).
[88] Life, pp. 373-4. Mill remarks (Logic, vol. i, p. 253) that Newton’s discovery “is the greatest example which has yet occurred of the transformation, at one stroke, of a science which was still to a great degree merely experimental into a deductive science.”
[89] He appears on almost every page of Professor Dowden’s article.
[90] My italics. The manuscript has been damaged by fire (probably in 1780), the edges of the pages being much scorched and singed.