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Sentiments concerning nature with which philosophers were delighted

Table of Contents

Book I.

It being our determination to discourse of Natural Philosophy, we judge it necessary, in the first place and chiefly, to divide the body of philosophy

Chapter XXVIII.

Book II.

Having finished my dissertation concerning principles and elements and those things which chiefly appertain to them, I will turn my pen to discourse o

Chapter XXVIII.

Book III.

In my two precedent treatises having in due order taken a compendious view and given an account of the celestial bodies, and of the moon which stands

Book IV.

Having taken a survey of the general parts of the world, I will take a view of the particular members of it.

Book V

Chapter XXVIII.

Chapter XII.

How it Comes to Pass that Children Have a Greater Similitude with Strangers Than with Their Parents.

The greatest part of physicians affirm, that this happens casually and fortuitously; for, when the sperm of the man and woman is too much refrigerated, then children carry a dissimilitude to their parents. Empedocles, that a woman's imagination in conception impresses a shape upon the infant; for women have been enamoured with images and statues, and the children which were born of them gave their similitudes. The Stoics, that the resemblances flow from the sympathy and consent of minds, through the insertion of effluvias and rays, not of images or pictures.