原文 (英语)

INTRODUCTION Ben Jonson’s “Discoveries” are, as he says in the few Latin words prefixed to them, “A wood—Sylva—of things and thoughts, in Greek ‘ὕλη’” [which has for its first meaning material, but is also applied peculiarly to kinds of wood, and to a wood], “from the multiplicity and variety of the material contained in it.  For, as we are commonly used to call the infinite mixed multitude of growing trees a wood, so the ancients gave the name of Sylvæ—Timber Trees—to books of theirs