[ o7b ] 



I, XIV'. On the Kaleidoscope. 



X HIS amusement being now in the hands of almost every per- 

 son, any description, more particular than what will present it- 

 selt in the subjoined historical detail, will here be unnecessary. 



Dr. Brewster, the patentee of this amu^ng instrument, is 

 charged by many with being a plagiarist, and claiming that, as i\ 

 new invention of his own, which is really old, and the discovery 

 of another. We shall lay the grounds of this charge before our 

 readers; — and we begin with some remarks which have appeared 

 in the French Journals : 



" Scarcely," says one of them, " had the Kaleidoscope been 

 imported into Paris, when twenty competitprs started forward, 

 and each, his glass in his hand, contended for the attention of 

 the public. To the Kaleidoscope one opposed the Polyoscope: 

 another the Metnmorphosiscope ; and as the great majority of 

 spectators called out for something French, we saw immediately 

 this wish gratified bv the Transfiguraletir, the French lamp, &c." 



** M. Robertson," a mathematical-instrument maker in Paris, 

 of some eminence, " reclaims for France the priority of this in- 

 vention. He brings in proof an instrument, of great dimension 

 it is true, but which for many years has furnished in his cabinet 

 the same various pictures which an adroit speculator has intro- 

 duced into the Kaleidoscope. Thus the Professor Brewster of 

 Edinburgh, to whom the English have attributed the honour of 

 this ^discovery, is nothing more than an imitator. This is not 

 the first time that a French discovery has taken the longest way 

 of arriving at Paris. M. Chevalier too enters the lists; holding 

 in one hand a work, published more than Jifty years ago, in 

 which the principle of this agreeable illusion is described, whilc 

 in the other he presents us a lamp which, by adding much to 

 the magic of the effects, merits truly the name which he gives 

 it of the French MuUiplicalor ." 



However mortifying it may be to our ingenious neighbours, 

 the French, to have their claims to the originality of this inven- 

 tion denied, the fact is, that, should the optical principle on 



^)le. But it requires little experience to know how fallacious and inade- 

 quate are all synthetical experiments ; and as in their nature they must be 

 founded on preconceived notions, they can never be of vnlue, but only 

 where they tend to confirm the accuracy of analysis, as in the decomposition 

 and recomposition of water. But if the facts here adduced prove any thin|:, 

 it is ratherthat chlorine and hydrogen produce muriatic acid, instead of tlie 

 latter beco.uinjj chlorine by the addition of oxygen. This is not altogether 

 improbable, nor incompatible with the reputed discovery of Lampadius, who 

 nupposes that muriatic acid is composed of hydrogen and oxyge.n united to 

 an inflammable base. — Rome, Feb. 1818, 



which 



