Valerius Terminus | Page 3

or limitation of consequential damages, so the above
disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have
other legal rights.
INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors, officers,
members and agents harmless from all liability, cost and expense,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, [2]
alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by disk, book
or any other medium if you either delete this "Small Print!" and all
other references to Project Gutenberg, or:
[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this requires that
you do not remove, alter or modify the etext or this "small print!"
statement. You may however, if you wish, distribute this etext in
machine readable binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,

including any form resulting from conversion by word pro- cessing or
hypertext software, but only so long as *EITHER*:
[*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and does *not*
contain characters other than those intended by the author of the work,
although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and underline (i) characters may be used
to convey punctuation intended by the author, and additional characters
may be used to indicate hypertext links; OR
[*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at no expense into
plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the program that displays
the etext (as is the case, for instance, with most word processors); OR
[*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at no additional
cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in its original plain ASCII form
(or in EBCDIC or other equivalent proprietary form).
[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small
Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the gross
profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to
calculate your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is
due. Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation" the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax
return. Please contact us beforehand to let us know your plans and to
work out the details.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time, public
domain etexts, and royalty free copyright licenses. If you are interested
in contributing scanning equipment or software or other items, please
contact Michael Hart at: hartPOBOX.com
*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN

ETEXTS*Ver.04.07.00*END*

This etext was prepared by Mike Pullen
[email protected]

Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature
by Francis Bacon

Preface by Robert Leslie Ellis
The following fragments of a great work on the Interpretation of Nature
were first published in Stephens's Letters and Remains [1734]. They
consist partly of detached passages, and partly of an epitome of twelve
chapters of the first book of the proposed work. The detached passages
contain the first, sixth, and eighth chapters, and portions of the fourth,
fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and sixteenth. The epitome
contains an account of the contents of all the chapters from the twelfth
to the twenty-sixth inclusive, omitting the twentieth, twentythird, and
twenty-fourth. Thus the sixteenth chapter is mentioned both in the
epitome and among the detached passages, and we are thus enabled to
see that the two portions of the following tract belong to the same work,
as it appears from both that the sixteenth chapter was to treat of the
doctrine of idola.
It is impossible to ascertain the motive which determined Bacon to give
to the supposed author the name of Valerius Terminus, or to his
commentator, of whose annotations we have no remains, that of
Hermes Stella. It may be conjectured that by the name Terminus he
intended to intimate that the new philosophy would put an end to the
wandering of mankind in search of truth, that it would be the
TERMINUS AD QUEM in which when it was once attained the mind
would finally acquiesce.

Again, the obscurity of the text was to be in some measure removed by
the annotations of Stella; not however wholly, for Bacon in the epitome
of the eighteenth chapter commends the manner of publishing
knowledge "whereby it shall not be to the capacity nor taste of all, but
shall as it were single and adopt his reader." Stella was therefore to
throw a kind of starlight on the subject, enough to prevent the student's
losing his way, but not much more.
However this may be, the tract is undoubtedly obscure,