The Hebrews call chapters and sections and other essential or convenient divisions, the bones of a book. The Latins called them _nodi_, knots or links; and every philologist knows that articles, whether grammatical, conventional, or of faith, are so denominated as being the joints of language, covenants and creeds. Now reader, the chapters of this book are the bones wherewith its body is compacted; the knots or links whereby its thread or chain of thoughts is connected; the articulations, without which it would be stiff, lame and disjointed. Every chapter has a natural dependence upon that which precedes, and in like manner a relation to that which follows it. Each grows out of the other. They follow in direct genealogy; and each could no more have been produced without relation to its predecessor, than Isaac could have begotten Jacob unless Abraham had begotten Isaac. Sometimes indeed it must of necessity happen that a new chapter opens with a new part of the subject, but this is because we are arrived at that part in the natural prosecution of our argument. The disruption causes no discontinuance; it is, (to pursue the former illustration,) as when the direct line in a family is run out, and the succession is continued by a collateral branch; or as in the mineral world, in which one formation begins where another breaks off. In my chapters, however, where there is no such natural division of the subject matter, I have ever observed that “one most necessary piece of mastership, which is ever performed by those of good skill in music, when they end a suit of lessons in any one key, and do intend presently to begin another in a differing key.” Upon which piece of mastership, the worthy old “Remembrancer of the best practical music, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world,” thus instructs his readers. “They do not abruptly and suddenly begin such new lessons, without some neat and handsome interluding-voluntary-like playing; which may by degrees (as it were) steal into that new and intended key. “Now that you may be able to do it handsomely, and without blemish, or incompleteness, (for you must know it is a piece of quaintness so to do), you must take notice, that always, when you have made an end of playing upon any one key, (if discourse or some other occasion do not cause a cessation of play for some pretty time, so as the remembrance of that former key may, in a manner, be forgotten), it will be very needful that some care be taken that you leave that key handsomely, and come into that other you intend next to play upon without impertinency. “For such impertinencies will seem to be very like such a thing as this, which I shall name—to wit—