Dissertation on a Solid Body Naturally Contained Within a Solid

DE SOLIDO INTRA SOLIDVM &c.

In fulfilling my promises, I shall do what is common practice among those burdened by debt; for, in order not to be forced to yield to the market when they have nothing with which to pay, they pay with what they have; and I, since I cannot perform everything that was to be shown to you, in order not to appear as if I have merely given empty words, will present the most important of the things that I have completed.

I would have delayed everything, not unwillingly, until I could complete individual parts upon my return to my Fatherland, had I not expected to encounter there the same fortune that I have experienced everywhere thus far, while new labors always obstruct the completion of the first ones. While I was intent upon enumerating the glands of the whole body, the miraculous structure of the heart snatched me away into an investigation of itself; and the deaths of my own people interrupted the efforts I had begun concerning the heart. In order that I might not be stuck describing muscles in minute detail, your Highnesses offered us a dog of prodigious size; and now, totally dedicated to the present experiments, I am invited to others, to whose nod the law of Nature commands obedience, and the great merits bestowed upon me and my own people urge me. I do not wish to anxiously inquire into how all these things come to pass without this; perhaps I might attribute to myself what is owed to a higher cause: if long meditation had added something, as if from my own mind, to discoveries not my own, surely if I had lingered longer in perfecting one discovery, I would have closed off to myself the entrance to finding the others. Being ignorant, therefore, of what other experiments and studies await me elsewhere, I think it best...