Some specific remedies being known to exist, it is indeed reasonable to suppose that others will be found. Old theorists went farther; and in a world which everywhere bears such undeniable evidences of design in every thing, few theories should seem more likely to be favourably received than the one which supposed that every healing plant bears, in some part of its structure, the type or signature of its peculiar virtues: now this could in no other way be so obviously marked, as by a resemblance to that part of the human frame for which its remedial uses were intended. There is a fable indeed which says that he who may be so fortunate as to taste the blood of a certain unknown animal would be enabled thereby to hear the voice of plants and understand their speech; and if he were on a mountain at sunrise, he might hear the herbs which grow there, when freshened with the dews of night they open themselves to the beams of the morning, return thanks to the Creator for the virtues with which he has indued them, each specifying what those virtues were, _le quali veramente son tante e tali che beati i pastori che quelle capessero_. A botanical writer who flourished a little before the theory of signatures was started complains that herbal medicine had fallen into disuse; he says, “_antequam chemia patrum nostrorum memoriâ orbi restitueretur, contenti vivebant ὅι τῶν ἰατρῶν κομψὸι και χαριὲστατοι pharmacis ex vegetabilium regno accersitis parum solliciti de Solis sulphure et oleo, de Lunæ sale et essentiâ, de Saturni saccaro, de Martis tincturâ et croco, de vitriolo Veneris, de Mercurio præcipitato, et Antimonii floribus, de Sulphuris spiritu et Tartari crystallis: nihilominus masculè debellabant morbos, et tutè et jucundè. Nunc sæculi nostri infelicitas est, quod vegetabilibus contemptim habitis, plerique nihil aliud spirant præter metallica ista, et extis parata horribilia secreta._”[3] The new theory came in timely aid of the Galenists; it connected their practice with a doctrine hardly less mysterious than those of the Paracelsists, but more plausible because it seemed immediately intelligible, and had a natural religious feeling to strengthen and support it. [Footnote 3: Petri Laurembergii Rostochiensis Horticultura—Præloquium, p. 10.] The Author of Adam in Eden refers to Oswald Crollius as “the great discoverer of signatures,” and no doubt has drawn from him, most of his remarks upon this theory of physical correspondence. The resemblance is in some cases very obvious; but in many more the Swedenborgian correspondences are not more fantastic; and where the resemblances exist the inference is purely theoretical.