46 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



of the Institute of France, one filling a huge place among the most eminent 

 of members "Never," said M. Biot, "was the supremacy of intellect so 

 justly established and so fully confessed; in mathematical and in experi- 

 mental science without an equal, and without an example, combining the 

 genius for both in its highest degree." The Principia he terms "the great- 

 est work ever produced by the mind of man;" adding, in the words of 

 Halley, that a nearer approach to the Divine nature has not been permitted 

 to mortals. " In first giving to the world Newton's ' Method of Fluxions/ ' 

 says Fontenelle, " Leibnitz did like Prometheus : he stole fire from Heaven 

 to bestow it upon men." "Does Newton," L'Hopital asked, "sleep and 

 wake like other men? I figure him to myself as a celestial genius, entirely 

 disengaged from matter." To so renowned a benefactor of the world, thus 

 exalted to the loftiest place by the common consent of all men, one whose 

 life, without the intermission of an hour, was passed in the search after 

 truths the most important, and at whose hands the human race had only 

 received good, never evil, no memorial has been raised by those nations 

 which erected statues to tyrants and conquerors, the scourges of mankind, 

 whose lives were passed, not in the pursuit of truth, but the practice of 

 falsehood, across whose lips, if truth ever chanced to stray towards some 

 selfish end, it surely failed to obtain belief, who, to slake their insane thirst 

 of power or of preeminence, trampled on all the rights, and squandered the 

 blood of their fellow-creatures, whose course, like lightning, blasted while 

 it dazzled, and who, reversing the Roman Emperor's noble regret, deemed 

 the day lost that saw the sun go down upon their forbearance, no victim 

 deceived, or betrayed, or oppressed. That the worshippers of such pestilent 

 genius should consecrate no outward symbol of the admiration they freely 

 confessed to the memory of the most illustrious of men, is not matter of 

 wonder; but that his own countrymen, justly proud of having lived in his 

 time, should have left this duty to their successors, after a century and a 

 half of professed veneration and lip-homage, may well be deemed strange. 

 The inscription upon the cathedral, the masterpiece of his celebrated friend's 

 architecture, may possibly be applied in defence of this neglect : " If you 

 seek for a monument, look around." If you seek for a monument, lift up 

 your eyes to the heavens, which show forth his fame. Nor, when we recol- 

 lect the Greek orator's exclamation, that the whole earth is the monument 

 of illustrious men, can we stop short of declaring that the Universe itself is 

 Newton's. Yet, in raising the statue which preserves his likeness, near the 

 place of his birth, and on the spot where his prodigious faculties were un- 

 folded and trained, we at once gratify our honest pride as citizens of the 

 same state, and humbly testify our grateful sense of the Divine goodness 

 which deigned to bestow upon our race one so marvellously gifted to com- 

 prehend the works of infinite wisdom, and to make all his study of them the 

 source of religious contemplation, both philosophical and sublime. 



CAMP'S IMPROVED LIFE-BOAT. 



The boat is thirty feet long, eight feet beam, and four feet hold, and 

 decked over, so that it can be entirely inclosed, and the occupants protected 

 from the washing of the sea, when required during a storm or heavy blow, 

 by means of a water-tight hatch. It is propelled by means of a propeller 

 wheel, worked with a crank by the inmates of the hold, and can be driven 

 at a speed of six to eight miles per hour with less effort than would bo 



