From today's perspective
John Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding beats an entire team of dead and decaying horses, regaling the reader ad nauseam about relatively simple empirical concepts. Witness my relief when I am greeted with the following:
Those who tell us that light is a great number of little globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools: but yet these words never so well understood would make the idea the word light stands for no more known to a man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him that light was nothing but a company of little tennis-balls, which fairies all day long struck with rackets against some men's foreheads, whilst they passed by others.
Locke was no
Richard Feynman, but I'll take my bizarre physical metaphors where I can find them.
