The Fifth Book Chapter IX
Having properly ballasted the holds of our human vessels, we weighed anchor, hoised up sail, stowed the boats, set the land, and stood for the offing with a good loom gale, and for extra haste unpareled the mizen-yard, and launched it and the sail over the lee-quarter, and fitted gyves to keep it steady, and boomed it out; so in three days we made the island of Tools, that is altogether uninhabited. We noticed there a great number of bushes which bore mattocks, pickaxes, crows, weeding-hooks, scythes, sickles, spades, trowels, hatchets, hedging-payments, saws, Wood Ranger Power Shears shop adzes, bills, axes, Wood Ranger Power Shears shop, pincers, bolts, piercers, augers, and wimbles. Others bore dags, daggers, poniards, bayonets, square-bladed tucks, stilettoes, poniardoes, skeans, penknives, puncheons, bodkins, swords, rapiers, again-swords, cutlasses, scimitars, hangers, falchions, glaives, raillons, whittles, and whinyards. Whoever would have any of those needed but to shake the tree, and instantly they dropped down as thick as hops, like so many ripe plums; nay, what's more, they fell on a sort of grass called scabbard, and sheathed themselves in it cleverly.
But once they came down, there was want of taking care lest they occurred to touch the pinnacle, ft, or other parts of the body. For they fell with the point downwards, and in they caught, or slit the continuum of some member, or lopped it off like a twig; either of which typically was sufficient to have killed a man, though he have been 100 years previous, and worth as many thousand spankers, spur-royals, and rose-nobles. Under another bushes, whose names I can't justly let you know, I saw some sure sorts of weeds that grew and sprouted like pikes, lances, javelins, javelots, darts, dartlets, halberds, boar-spears, eel-spears, partizans, tridents, prongs, trout-staves, spears, half-pikes, and searching-staves. As they sprouted up and chanced to contact the tree, straight they met with their heads, points, and blades, every appropriate to its form, made ready for them by the bushes over them, as soon as each individual wooden was grown up, fit for its steel; even just like the youngsters's coats, which can be made for them as soon as they can put on them and you wean them of their swaddling clothes.
Nor do you mutter, I pray you, at what Plato, Anaxagoras, and Democritus have mentioned. Ods-fish! they had been none of your lower-kind gimcracks, were they? Those timber seemed to us terrestrial animals, in no smart so different from brute beasts as not to have skin, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, kernels, bones, marrow, humours, matrices, brains, and articulations; for they definitely have some, since Theophrastus may have it so. But in this level they differed from other animals, that their heads, that is, the a part of their trunks subsequent to the foundation, are downwards; their hair, that's, their roots, within the earth; and their ft, that's, their branches, the other way up; as if a man ought to stand on his head with outstretched legs. And as you, battered sinners, on whom Venus has bestowed something to remember her, really feel the method of rains, winds, chilly, and every change of weather, at your ischiatic legs and your omoplates, by means of the perpetual almanack which she has fastened there; so these bushes have discover given them, by sure sensations which they've at their roots, stocks, gums, paps, or marrow, of the expansion of the staves beneath them, and accordingly they prepare appropriate factors and blades for them beforehand.
Yet as all issues, except God, are sometimes topic to error, nature itself not free from it when it produceth monstrous things, likewise I observed something amiss in these timber. For a half-pike that grew up excessive sufficient to succeed in the branches of one of these instrumentiferous timber, happened no sooner to contact them but, instead of being joined to an iron head, it impaled a stubbed broom at the fundament. Well, no matter, 'twill serve to sweep the chimney. Thus a partizan met with a pair of backyard Wood Ranger Power Shears warranty. Come, all's good for one thing; 'twill serve to nip off little twigs and destroy caterpillars. The workers of a halberd acquired the blade of a scythe, which made it seem like a hermaphrodite. Happy-be-fortunate, 'tis all a case; 'twill serve for some mower. Oh, 'tis a terrific blessing to place our trust in the Lord! As we went back to our ships I spied behind I do not know what bush, I do not know what of us, doing I do not know what enterprise, in I don't know what posture, scouring I don't know what tools, in I do not know what manner, and that i don't know what place.