This microscopes plainly discover to us; for what to our naked
eyes produces a certain colour, is, by thus augmenting the acuteness
of our senses, discovered to be quite a different thing; and the
thus altering, as it were, the proportion of the bulk of the minute
parts of a coloured object to our usual sight, produces different
ideas from what it did before. Thus, sand or pounded glass, which is
opaque, and white to the naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope; and a
hair seen in this way, loses its former colour, and is, in a great
measure, pellucid, with a mixture of some bright sparkling colours,
such as appear from the refraction of diamonds, and other pellucid
bodies. Blood, to the naked eye, appears all red; but by a good
microscope, wherein its lesser parts appear, shows only some few
globules of red, swimming in a pellucid liquor, and how these red
globules would appear, if glasses could be found that could yet
magnify them a thousand or ten thousand times more, is uncertain.
12. Our faculties for discovery of the qualities and powers of
substances suited to our state. The infinite wise Contriver of us, and
all things about us, hath fitted our senses, faculties, and organs, to
the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here. We
are able, by our senses, to know and distinguish things: and to
examine them so far as to apply them to our uses, and several ways
to accommodate the exigences of this life.
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