Dissertation on a Solid Body Naturally Contained Within a Solid

ON THE SOLID WITHIN THE SOLID, &c.

... pursuing truth through experiments; for as soon as certain signs of an unknown truth have appeared to them, they think that the whole matter will be instantly detected. Nor will they ever be able to correctly calculate the amount of time required to resolve that interconnected series of difficulties which, emerging gradually and as if from a hidden place, constantly retard those hurrying to the end by presenting new impediments. The beginning of a task merely shows certain common and commonly known difficulties; but as for what is included within these—whether to overturn the false, to establish the true, to elucidate the obscure, or to produce the unknown—hardly anyone will have detected it before the thread of investigation has led him there. Nor did Democritus use the example of a well poorly, where hardly anyone would have correctly measured the labor and time of drawing [water] unless by the act of drawing; since both the number of hidden veins and the amplitude of the matter leave the abundance of the flow uncertain. Therefore, do not be surprised, MOST SERENE PRINCE, if I have said that an investigation to which the teeth of a Canis Carcharias Great White Shark had provided the occasion was nearing its end for a whole year and more, on almost every single day. For having seen the lands from which shells and other such excrement of the sea are dug up once and again, when I understood that those lands were sediments of a turbid sea, and that in individual places the number could be calculated as often as the sea had been turbid there, I immediately considered the whole scrutiny to be a task of very brief time...