Excerpt from Essentials of the Principles and Practice of Medicine: A Handy-Book for Students and Practitioners Before Lord Bacon, and before, in fact, all others whose writings have come down to us, Da Vinci, the architect, painter, and engineer, proclaimed in the first half of the sixteenth century, that in the study Of natural truth we must consult experience, experience rather than reason. Those, said he, who in the study of the sciences do not consult nature, but authors, are not the children of nature, they are only her grandchildren. Nature begins from the reason and ends in experience, but we must take the reverse course, begin from the experiment and try to discover the reason. Theory is the general, but experiments are the soldiers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.