Life of Count Rumford. 491 



improvement on every subject of the kind that engaged 

 his attention. He knew very well that as there is no 

 panacea in medicine, so there is no faultless piece of 

 mechanism which will answer ends so unlike as were 

 some of the objects which he tried to attain at the same 

 time. His desire and pains to secure testimonials, from 

 private persons and from the managers of public insti- 

 tutions, of the utility of his improvements indicate that 

 he had to urge them into notice. They failed in use 

 sometimes, because of the neglect of some of the prime 

 conditions frankly and emphatically declared by him as 

 essential to their success. 



The Count's tenth Essay relates mainly to the con- 

 struction of kitchen fireplaces and utensils. It is the 

 longest of his essays, and was published at intervals, 

 four years after it was announced, in three parts, the 

 third of which appeared only just before, if not even 

 after, his leaving England for the last time. It is of an 

 exceedingly homely, economical, and thrifty tenor, ex- 

 hibiting many tokens and expressions of the writer's 

 earnest and practical benevolence, especially of his pure 

 and generous sympathies with, and his desire to pro- 

 mote the comfort of, the poor, as also of his horror of 

 waste of anything good, and of his deep conviction that 

 the means of life may be made to afford far more of 

 pleasure and satisfaction than men ordinarily obtain 

 from them. There are evidences, likewise, in the Essay, 

 that the Count was aware of the jeers and ridicule occa- 

 sionally visited upon him in the ephemeral journals for 

 his very sublunary theorizings and experiments. We 

 are glad to have had Pictet's testimony, as given on a 

 previous page, that the Count was only amused by 

 some of the references to him in the newspapers. 



