1830.] Affairs in General 337 



put into barrels to be sent to France. The coined silver which has been 

 found is supposed to amount to 18,000 cubic feet, besides chests filled 

 with gold bars and doubloons/' 



In Sir H. Davy's " Last Days of a Philosopher/' a title, by the by, 

 which seems the last that the modesty of a true philosopher would 

 assume, there are some observations on the discoveries for which we are 

 indebted to accident. 



" Lucretius attributes to accident the discovery of the fusion of the 

 metals ; a person in touching a shell-fish, observes, that it emits a purple 

 liquid as a dye, hence the Tyrian purple ; a clay is observed to harden 

 in the fire, and hence the invention of bricks, which could hardly fail 

 ultimately to lead to the discovery of porcelain ; even glass, the most 

 perfect and beautiful of those manufactures you call chemical, is said to 

 have been discovered by accident. Theophrastus states, that some mer- 

 chants, who were cooking on lumps of soda or natron, near the mouth of 

 the river Belus, observed that a hard and vitreous substance was formed 

 where the fused natron ran into the sand." 



The philosopher might have enlarged his list. It is a remarkable cir- 

 cumstance, that almost the whole of those great leading discoveries by 

 which the mastery of nature is given to man, have been the work of 

 what, for want of a better name, we call accident. Gunpowder, print- 

 ing, the use of steam, the telescope, the mariner's compass, electricity, 

 galvanism, the use of the pendulum, the principle of gravitation, together 

 with a crowd of minor discoveries of immeasurable value, have been all 

 offered to us by means beyond our power or our expectation. Is it " to 

 consider the matter too curiously," to believe that this constant effect has 

 not been without some distinguishing moral cause ? In a physical view 

 we know that there is no such thing as accident. But, in the higher 

 moral contemplation, may we not conjecture, that this unfailing interpo- 

 sition has a purpose, perhaps many purposes ; and that one of them is to 

 remind men, however engrossed by the pride of heart, so peculiarly 

 awakened by the pride of science, that after all, its greatness is adminis- 

 tered from a mightier fount than that of philosophy, and that our light 

 is darkness until it is visited by the lustre from an unclouded throne. 



Our great English absentees deserve to be soundly punished for their 

 ungenerous expenditure of the money, which as they got from England, 

 they should give back to England ; and if some new revolution in Italy 

 or Switzerland, or any where on the face of the earth shall catch them 

 in its trap, we shall rejoice at the sorrows of the dukes and earls, 

 the duchesses and countesses, so entrapped. We hope, for instance, that 

 that papist young gentleman, and very profound patriot, my Lord 

 Shrewsbury, may be soundly swinged in the next bustle at Rome, and 

 date his next dispatches from the Castle of St. Angelo. Here is a 

 patriot who spends his foolish old uncle's donation of 40,000 a year, 

 among the saints and sinners of Rome, yet calls himself an Englishman, 

 and talks of being a patriot We give a fragment from the late Lord 

 Harcourt's will, as a model that ought to be universally adopted. 

 This will directs, " That if the person who shall succeed to the lands 

 purchased with the 80,000. (left in the first instance to his widow) be 

 absent from England more than six months at one time, unless he be so 

 in the civil or military service of Great Britain, or under 25 years of 



M.M. New Series. -Voi. X. No. 57. 2 U 



