[82] Bacon gives this unfortunate term its proper signification; μετα, in composition, with the Greeks signifying change or mutation. Most of our readers, no doubt, are aware that the obtrusion of this word into technical philosophy was purely capricious, and is of no older date than the publication of Aristotle’s works by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of the learned men into whose hands the manuscripts of that philosopher fell, after they were brought by Sylla from Athens to Rome. To fourteen books in these MSS. with no distinguishing title, Andronicus is said to have prefixed the words τα μετα τα φυσικα, to denote the place which they ought to hold either in the order of Aristotle’s arrangement, or in that of study. These books treat first of those subjects which are common to matter and mind; secondly, of things separate from matter, _i.e._ of God, and of the subordinate spirits, which were supposed by the Peripatetics to watch over particular portions of the universe. The followers of Aristotle accepted the whimsical title of Andronicus, and in their usual manner allowed a word to unite things into one science which were plainly heterogeneous. Their error was adopted by the Peripatetics of the Christian Church. The schoolmen added to the notion of ontology, the science of the mind, or pneumatology, and as that genus of being has since become extinct with the schools, metaphysics thus in modern parlance comes to be synonymous with psychology. It were to be wished that Bacon’s definition of the term had been accepted, and mental science delivered from one of the greatest monstrosities in its nomenclature, yet Bacon whimsically enough in his De Augmentis includes mathematics in metaphysics.--_Ed._ [83] “Ne tenues pluviæ, rapidive potentia solis Acrior, aut Boreæ penetrabile frigus adurat.” --Virg. Georg. i. 92, 93. [84] This notion, which he repeats again, and particularizes in the 18th aph. of this book, is borrowed from the ancients, and we need not say is as wise as their other astronomical conjectures. The sun also approaches stars quite as large in other quarters of the zodiac, when it looks down upon the earth through the murky clouds of winter. When that luminary is in Leo, the heat of the earth is certainly greater than at any other period, but this arises from the accumulation of heat after the solstice, for the same reason that the maximum heat of the day is at two o’clock instead of noon.--_Ed._ [85] Bouguer, employed by Louis XIV. in philosophical researches, ascended the Andes to discover the globular form of the earth, and published an account of his passage, which verifies the statement of Bacon.