viii Preface. 



I should need to do in the case would be to gather 

 from published sources the materials for a brief prefatory 

 paper, which should give the dates and principal events 

 and labors of the Count's career. In undertaking to 

 do only this, the search and inquiry which were neces- 

 sary led on to further investigations, rewarded by such 

 an amount of authentic and interesting documents as in 

 the view of the Rumford Committee justified the assign- 

 ing of an additional volume for the memoir. As will 

 be noticed by the reader, the new material used in 

 the following pages is mostly of manuscripts gathered 

 from public and private sources. I have indicated 

 these sources either in the text or the notes of this 

 volume. 



The Life of Count Rumford contributed by Pro- 

 fessor Renwick to Sparks's Library of American Biog- 

 raphy, allowing for its necessary compactness, is a very 

 excellent performance. The writer, I suppose, had the 

 use of some of the Baldwin manuscripts above referred 

 to. Professor Pictet, in some letters of his published 

 in the Bibliothtque Britannique, furnished the substance 

 of the matter which appears in the biographical sketches 

 of Count Rumford contained in the Encyclopaedias and 

 Biographical Dictionaries, all of which are imperfect, 

 and which repeat the same errors, trivial and impor- 

 tant. Colonel Baldwin's series of four articles on the 

 Count's life and labors, published in two volumes of 

 the Literary Miscellany, while the Count was living, 

 have a particular value. 



