Boyle published his Tracts about the Cosmical Qualities of Things in 1671 (although its imprimatur is dated 3 November 1669), as a kind of sequel to the Origin of Forms and Qualities of 1666, but unlike the latter work these tracts have attracted very little scholarly attention. If they have been noticed at all they have been given a seemingly unproblematic mechanistic interpretation. Boyle defines ‘systematical or cosmical’ qualities as those qualities of a body which do not derive from the sizes, shapes and motions of its constituent particles, but

‘A system [of the world] so constituted as ours is’, Boyle wrote, ‘whose fabrick is such that there may be divers unheeded agents, which, by unperceived means, may have great operations upon the body we consider’, can give rise to special attributes of that body. It is by no means immediately clear what Boyle has in mind here, but, relying upon standard assumptions about the nature of the mechanical philosophy and about Boyle's status as a leading mechanist, it might seem reasonable to suppose that Boyle is merely extending the discussion in the Origin of Forms and Qualities about the power of a key to open a lock.