 In the ensuing centuries, several natural and experimental philosophers, including Avicenna and Zabarella, Bacon and Boyle, the authors of the Port-Royal Logic and Newton, and many others, expounded rules of reasoning and methods for arriving at new knowledge. The ancient notion of analysis still informed these rules and methods. Newton’s famous thirty-first query in the second edition of the Opticks outlines the role of analysis in discovery as follows: “As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths … By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis” (Newton 1718, 380, see Koertge 1980, section VI). Early modern accounts of discovery captured knowledge-seeking practices in the study of living and non-living nature, ranging from astronomy and physics to medicine, chemistry, and agriculture. These rich accounts of scientific inquiry were often expounded to bolster particular theories about the nature of matter and natural forces and were not explicitly labeled “methods of discovery”, yet they are, in fact, accounts of knowledge generation and proper scientific reasoning, covering topics such as the role of the senses in knowledge generation, observation and experimentation, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, hypotheses, probability, and certainty. 