588 _. MEMOIR OF 
whose names can never be listened to in this place without 
emotion : 
Dear Sir, 
“ T have read over your paper with the greatest pleasure. 
The composition is what it ought to be, simple, elegant, and 
perfectly perspicuous, and will be avery great ornament to our 
Memoirs. Some of my chemical friends, however, are of opi- 
nion, that the degree of vitrification which takes place in the 
specimens of these forts, is too great to be the effect of any ac- 
cidental fire, such as you suppose, and could be produced only 
by a great accumulation of wood, heaped upon the wall after 
it was built. This is a subject of which Iam ignorant. You 
had convinced me, who fancied that this imperfect vitrification 
was more likely to be the effect of accident than of knowledge. 
The friends I mean, are Dr Brack and Dr Hurron, who in 
every other respect entertain the same high opinion of your 
composition which Ido. You had better converse with them : 
you may convince them, or they may convince you; and even 
though neither of these two events should happen, the offence, 
I apprehend, will not be great, either to them or to you. I 
have the honour to be, Me 
. “ Apam Smit.” 
In the year 1790, Mr Tyrer read in the Society those pa- 
pers on Translation, which they who heard them will remem- 
ber to have been listened to with so much pleasure, and which 
he soon after published without his name, and under the mo- 
dest title of an Essay on the Principles of Translation. The 
work was scarcely published, when it occasioned a correspon- 
dence with the late learned and ingenious Dr Campsext, Prin- 
cipal 
