3 On Puritanism and science see Robert Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York, 1970); the Merton thesis has stimulated a large controversial literature which is reviewed in idem, Sociology of Science in Europe (Carbondale, 1977).
4 Edward Eggleston, Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (1900, Boston, 1959), 1-47; an excellent survey of this subject appears in David D. Hall, “The Mentality of the Supernatural in Seventeenth Century New England,” CSMP 63 (1964), 239-74.
5 Increase Mather, Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (Boston, 1684), reprinted in Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 (New York, 1914), 9, 12-13. Idem, Heaven’s Alarm to the World (Boston, 1682); idem, Kometographia (Boston, 1684); Johnson, Wonder-working Providence; Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World (1692, rpt. London, 1862).