he has taken in, Sir, the
whole subject--examined every part of it dialectically--then brought
it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which either the
collision of his own natural parts could strike--or the profoundest
knowledge of the sciences had impowered him to cast upon it--collating,
collecting, and compiling--begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went
along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools and
porticos of the learned: so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be
considered, not only as a model--but as a thorough-stitched Digest and
regular institute of noses, comprehending in it all that is or can be
needful to be known about them.

For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise)
valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either,
plump upon noses--or collaterally touching them;--such for instance
as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite
learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above
four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in
Silesia, which he had rummaged--has informed us, that the mensuration
and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any
given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crush'd
down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them--are
much nearer alike, than the world imagines;--the difference amongst them
being, he says, a mere trifle, not worth taking notice of;--but that the
size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks
above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilaginous
and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts and sinuses the blood and
animal spirits being impell'd and driven by the warmth and force of the
imagination, which is but a step from it (bating the case of idiots,
whom Prignitz, who had lived many years in Turky, supposes under the
more immediate tutelage of Heaven)--it so happens, and ever must, says
Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical
proportion to the excellency of the wearer's fancy.

It is for the same reason, that is, because 'tis all comprehended in
Slawkenbergius, that I say nothing likewise of Scroderus (Andrea)
who, all the world knows, set himself to oppugn Prignitz with great
violence--proving it in his own way, first logically, and then by a
series of stubborn facts, 'That so fa