2i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



there." We fancy that we feel the draught, the motion of a wind, 

 but it is mostly increase of one-sided heat-loss by radiation toward 

 the cold place. People generally believe, rather, that the wind comes 

 through the walL But the velocity of such a wind is too small to 

 be felt as air in motion^ and a piece of carpet fixed to the suspected 

 wall does away with the supposed draught. It could, therefore, not 

 be caused by the air-rush through the wall, because the carpet is 

 many times more permeable to air than the wall. 



I hope, in future, ventilation and draught will be to your mind 

 two distinct things. 



SPINOZA: 1677 AKD 1877.' 



By ERNEST KENAN. 



ON this day two hundred years, in the afternoon, and at about this 

 same hour, there lay dying, at the age of forty-three, on the quiet 

 quay of the Pavilioengragt a few paces hence, a poor man, whose life 

 had been so profoundly silent that his last sigh was scarcely heard. 

 He had occupied a retired room in the house of a worthy pair, who, 

 without understanding him, felt for him an instinctive veneration. 

 On the morning of his last day he had gone down as usual to join his 

 hosts ; there had been religious services that morning ; the gentle phi- 

 losopher conversed with the good folk about what the minister had 

 said, much approved it, and advised them to conform themselves there- 

 to. The host and hostess (let us name them ; their honest sincerity 

 entitles them to a place in this beautiful Idyl of the Hague related 

 by Colerus), the Van der Spycks, husband and wife, went back to 

 their devotions. On their return home, their peaceful lodger was dead. 

 The funeral, on the 25th of February, was conducted like that of a 

 Christian believer, in the new chui'ch on the Spuy. All the inhabitants 

 of the district greatly regretted the disappearance of the sage who 

 had lived among them as one of themselves. His hosts preserved his 

 memory like a religion, and none who had approached him ever spoke 

 of him without calling him, according to custom, " the blessed Spi- 

 noza." 



About the same time, however, any one able to track the current 

 of opinion setting in among the professedly enlightened circles of the 

 Pharisaism of that day, would have seen, in singular contrast, the 

 much-loved philosopher of the simple and single-hearted become the 

 bugbear of the narrow orthodoxy which pretended to a monopoly of 

 the truth. A wretch, a pestilence, an imp of hell, the most wicked 

 atheist that ever lived, a man steeped in crime this was what the 



' Address delivered at the unveiling of the monument at the Hague, February 21, 



18V7. 



