" Whereas the four elements had agreed to live together in peace, the
earthquake came and set them by the ears, to the detriment of property
and danger of life," — Translated from a pamphlet containing some
account of a prolonged earthquake in Leghorn in 1741, hy Raphael Meldola,
of Bayonne; published in Leghorn, 1742.
"The circumstances which accompany any observed fact are main
features of its observation, at least until it is ascertained by sufficient
experience what circumstances have nothing to do with it, and might
therefore have been left unobserved without sacrificing the fact. In
observing and recording a fact therefore altogether new, we ought not to
omit any circumstance capable of being noted, lest some one of the
omitted circumstances should be essentially connected with the fact, and
its omission should therefore reduce the implied statement of a law of
Nature, to the mere record of an historical event."—Herschel's ' Preliminary
Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.'