240 Life of Count Rumford. 



publication of the author on the same subject. He 

 recognizes the valuable services rendered by Count 

 Rumford at the beginning of this century, the im- 

 portant improvements which he introduced, and the 

 enthusiasm and gratitude which he called forth so 

 widely over the kingdom in great houses and in hum- 

 ble homes. He regrets that indifference, carelessness, 

 and wastefulness, have allowed his valuable, salutary 

 and economical inventions and arrangements to fall 



o 



into disuse and oblivion, and zealously pleads for their 

 revival. The book is illustrated by plates and direc- 

 tions which would almost lead one who was resting for 

 an hour from recording the life of Count Rumford to 

 imagine that his fading memory was being revived by 

 one who shared his interest in culinary economy. I 

 also see, almost daily, passing through our streets, an 

 express wagon which bears the inscription, " Rumford 

 Food Laboratory." It is in the service of an estab- 

 lishment in the main thoroughfare of this city, which 

 announces in its advertisements that it will furnish 

 cooked provisions daily, nutritive, hot, and cheap, to 

 lonely lodgers, or to families without cook or kitchen. 

 During this transient residence of less than one year 

 in England, busily occupied as he was in a variety of 

 interesting and important occupations, scientific and 

 economical, Count Rumford, by what was for the time 

 a most munificent endowment, provided in both hemi- 

 spheres for the incidental connection of his own name, 

 perpetually, with the progressive pursuit of his own 

 favorite study in the philosophy of light and heat. 

 If we look to the lines of the sightless Milton for the 

 most exquisite and touching utterances of poetry on 

 the " co-eternal " element of light, we must assign to 



