exercising their wit, and their imagination, about the 
     works of Nature, more than was consistent with a sincere 
     Inquiry into them. (90)

     By a kind of metamorphosis it follows from Sprat’s 
position (which tries to follow Bacon) that the modern scientist 
or philosopher is the true poet. And in order to purge the dross 
of the past from the present, Sprat sees the Royal Society as 
having “endeavour’d to separate the knowledge of Nature from 
the colors of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful 
deceit of Fables.”

     The procedure of separation and segmentation as the 
very technique of applied  knowledge comes out clearly wherever 
a job of reducing antiquity arises. The members of the Royal 
Society being privy to this technique, repudiate “this vicious