Companies accept
of heroic poems for their sealed bonds. Upon which bottom, our
publishers have full power to treat with the city in behalf of us
authors, to enable traders to become patrons and Fellows of the Royal
Society, as well as receive certain degrees of skill in the Latin and
Greek tongues, according to the quantity of the commodities which they
take off our hands.

Grecian Coffee-house, July 18.

The learned have so long laboured under the imputation of dryness and
dulness in their accounts of their phenomena, that an ingenious
gentleman of our society has resolved to write a system of philosophy in
a more lively method, both as to the matter and language, than has been
hitherto attempted. He read to us the plan upon which he intends to
proceed. I thought his account, by way of fable of the worlds about us,
had so much vivacity in it, that I could not forbear transcribing his
hypothesis, to give the reader a taste of my friend's treatise, which is
now in the press.[419]

"The inferior deities having designed on a day to play a game at
football, knead together a numberless collection of dancing atoms into
the form of seven rolling globes: and that nature might be kept from a
dull inactivity, each separate particle is endued with a principle of
motion, or a power of attraction, whereby all the several parcels of
matter draw each other proportionately to their magnitudes and
distances, into such a remarkable variety of different forms, as to
produce all the wonderful appearances we now observe in empire,
philosophy, and religion. To proceed; at the beginning of the game, each
of the globes being struck forward with a vast violence, ran out of
sight, and wandered in a straight line through the infinite spaces. The
nimble deities pursue, breathless almost, and spent in the eager chase;
each of them caught hold of one, and stamped it with his name; as,
Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and so of the rest. To prevent this inconvenience
for the future, the seven are condemned to a precipitation, which in our
inferior style we call 'gravity.' Thus the tangential and centripetal
forces, by their counter-struggle, make the celestial bodies describe an
exact ellipsis."

There will be added to this an appendix, in defence of the first day of
the term according to the Oxford Almanac,[420] by a learned knight of
this realm, with an apology for the said knight's manner of dress;
proving, that his habit, according to this hypothe