 To attempt to produce examples of reduction that conform to the ideal of the mechanical atomists is, in effect, to attempt to bolster the arguments from intelligibility with empirical arguments. The issue of empirical support for mechanical atomism, or any other version of atomism, raises a fundamental problem, a problem that Maurice Mandelbaum (1964, 88–112) has called ‘the problem of transdiction’. How are we to reach knowledge of unobservable atoms from knowledge of the bulk matter to which we have observational and experimental access? Mandelbaum credits Boyle with proposing a solution to the problem and he is endorsed by Newman (2006). Roughly speaking, the solution is that knowledge that is confirmed at the level of observation, that is found to apply to all matter whatsoever, and is scale invariant can be assumed to apply to atoms also. There is no doubt that an argument of this kind is to be found in Boyle, but it is highly problematic and can hardly be regarded as the solution to the epistemological problems faced by a seventeenth-century atomist.