reason above passion, that and watchfullnesse will be your best defendants. To which purpose you may consider, that, though such excuses as this,—He provok’t mee so much I could not forbear,—may pass among friends, yet amongst strangers they are insignificant, and only argue a traveller’s weaknesse. “To these I may add some general heads for inquirys or observations, such as at present I can think on. As, 1. To observe the policys, wealth, and state-affairs of nations, so far as a solitary traveller may conveniently doe. 2. Their impositions upon all sorts of people, trades, or commoditys, that are remarkable. 3. Their laws and customs, how far they differ from ours. 4. Their trades and arts wherein they excell or come short of us in England. 5. Such fortifications as you shall meet with, their fashion, strength, and advantages for defence, and other such military affairs as are considerable. 6. The power and respect belonging to their degrees of nobility or magistracy. 7. It will not be time mispent to make a catalogue of the names and excellencys of those men that are most wise, learned, or esteemed in any nation. 8. Observe the mechanisme and manner of guiding ships. 9. Observe the products of nature in several places, especially in mines, with the circumstances of mining and of extracting metals or minerals out of their oare, and of refining them; and if you meet with any transmutations out of their own species into another (as out of iron into copper, out of any metall into quicksilver, out of one salt into another, or into an insipid body, &c.), those, above all, will be worth your noting, being the most luciferous, and many times lucriferous experiments too, in philosophy. 10. The prices of diet and other things. 11. And the staple commoditys of places.