‘Which so exposed to my masters the vanity of that confident man, that they were forced plainly to let him know their mind,’ wrote the Arch-Bedal, and some of his own sentiments were expressed in a letter which he afterwards quoted in the Preface to his book _The Great and New Art_ ‘Sir,—I admire exceedingly the forwardness of your humor (I will call it no worse) in your last to ——: he is a person not concerned in you or in your books, neither will he ignorantly commend anything, as it seems ye expected he should have done, when ye sent him these papers. Ye might have known long ago that he had no veneration for what ye had formerly published, for he made no secret of his mind, when he was put to it. Ye may mistake him, if ye think that any by-end will cause him speak what he thinks not: nevertheless he delivered your commission, and was willing to be unconcerned, expecting their answer. They pressed him to know his judgment of your last piece: he told ingenuously the truth, that there was none of them had less esteem for it than himself. He hopes you are so much a Christian, that ye will not be offended with him for speaking what he thought when he had a call to it; and yet albeit ye seem to favour him more than others, he hath ground to look upon himself as one of the sophistical rabble, for they only are such who condemn anything ye do, the rest of the University continuing always learned persons. It is to no purpose to apologize for themselves, ye take all for granted, which ye have heard: I shall not put you to the pains of proving it; yet it seems ye would hardly have believed it so easily, had not your conscience told you, that they had some reason for their judgement, which really was this following: That they see nothing in your last piece, new and great (albeit it be _Ars nova et Magna_) save errors and nonsense; as your demonstrations of the pendulum, your _Nihil spatiale_, your _Gravitas circularis_, and _horizontalis_, your question “Whether or no a body may be condensed in a point?” etc., too many to fill several letters: for ye must not call experiments new inventions, otherwise ye are making new inventions every day, neither must ye call different explications new inventions, else the same thing might be invented by almost every Writer. I admire how ye question the R. Society; for I desire to know one point of doctrine, which ye or they either pretend to, concerning the weight of the air, the spring of it, or anything else in your book, save mistakes, which was not received by all mathematicians, and the most learned of Philosophers many years before any of you put pen to paper. Ye have been at much pains to prove that by experiment, which all the learned already grant, and some have demonstrat _à priori_ from the principles of Geometry and Staticks, and many _à posteriori_ from experience if sense may be called a demonstration: yet ye are the only man who produceth the _Ars Nova et Magna_ when all others are out of fashion.