The hurtful Teeth of Vipers are for ought I know useless to us, and yet are not to be deny'd to be parts of their Bodies; and it were hard to shew of what greater Use to Us, then Phlegme and Earth, are those Undiscern'd Stars, which our New _Telescopes_ discover to Us, in many Blanched places of the Sky; and yet we cannot but acknowledge them Constituent and Considerably great parts of the Universe. Besides that whether or no the Phlegme and Earth be immediately Useful, but necessary to constitute the Body whence they are separated; and consequently, if the mixt Body be not Useless to us, those constituent parts, without which it could not have been That mixt Body, may be said not to be Unuseful to Us: and though the Earth and Water be not so conspicuously Operative (after separation) as the other three more active Principles, yet in this case it will not be amiss to remember the lucky Fable of _Menemius Aggrippa_, of the dangerous Sedition of the Hands and Legs, and other more busie parts of the Body, against the seemingly unactive Stomack. And to this case also we may not unfitly apply that Reasoning of an Apostle, to another purpose; _If the Ear shall say, because I Am not the Eye, I am not of the Body; Is it therefore not of the Body? If the whole Body were Eye, where were the Hearing? If the whole were for hearing, where the smelling?_ In a word, since Earth and water appear, as clearly and as generally as the other Principles upon the resolution of Bodies, to be the Ingredients whereof they are made up; and since they are useful, if not immediately to us, or rather to Physitians, to the Bodies they constitute, and so though in somewhat a remoter way, are serviceable to us; to exclude them out of the number of Elements, is not to imitate Nature. [Transcriber's Note: See the printer's note (beginning "The Authors constant Absence") at the end of the book for material that the printer inadvertently omitted from this page.]