The Tatler - 1804 Author:Joseph Addison Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: N 119. THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 1709-10. It tenui labor VIRG. Gcorg. lib. iv. 6. Slight is the subject. DRYDEN. Sheer-lane, January 11. I Have lat... more »ely applied myself with much satisfaction to the curious discoveries that have been made by the help of microscopes, as they are related by authors of our own and oilier nations. There is a great deal of pleasure in prying into this world of wonders, which nature has laid out of sight, and seems industrious to conceal from us. Philosophy had ranged over all the visible creation, and began to want objects for her inquiries, when the present age, by the invention of glasses, opened a new and inexhaustible magazine of rarities, more wonderful and amazing than any of those which astonished our forefathers. I was yesterday amusing myself with speculations of this kind, and reflecting upon the myriads of animals that swim in those little seas of juices that are contained in the several vessels of an human body. While my mind was thus filled with that secret wonder and delight, I could not but look upon myself as in an act of devo- tion,and am very well pleased with the thought of the great heathen anatomist1, who calls his description of the parts of an human body, An Hymn to the Supreme Being. The reading of the day produced in my imagination an agreeable morning's dream, if I 1 Galen:—De Usu Partium. may call it such ; for I am still in doubt whether it passed in my sleeping, or waking, thoughts. However it was, I fancied that my good genius stood at my bed's head, and entertained me with the following discourse; for, upon my rising, it dwelt so strongly upon me, that I writ down the substance of it, if not the very words. ' If,' said he, ' you can be so transported with those productions of nature which are discovere...« less