430 Life of Count Rumford. 



his love of appreciation, was ministered to in having 

 the edifice freely exhibited to visitors from all classes of 

 society who thronged to examine it. Of one of the novel 

 contrivances in that edifice, on which the Count greatly 

 prided himself, Pictet was strangely unobservant. It 

 was what the Count called a concealed kitchen^ recom- 

 mended and described by him in his Tenth Essay. 

 Two of these, very complete, had been fitted up by him 

 in the Royal Institution as models, one in the house- 

 keeper's room, the other in the great kitchen. He 

 writes : " There are also two kitchens of this kind in 

 my house at Brompton in two adjoining rooms, which 

 have been fitted up principally with a view to showing 

 that all the different processes of cookery may be car- 

 ried on in a room which, on entering it, nobody would 

 suspect to be a kitchen." 



And he proceeds to describe the contrivance at length, 

 with diagrams.* 



In translating for their own pages Count Rumford's 

 Prospectus of the Royal Institution, the editors of the 

 Bibliotheque Britannique^* introduce it with the follow- 

 ing prefatory remarks, commencing with an extract 

 from Madame de Stael's essay on Literature consid- 

 ered in its Relations to Social Institutions. 



" ' Nothing so animates and tones the spirit as the hope of 

 rendering useful service to the human race. When the thought 

 proves the immediate precursor of action, when the happy pur- 

 pose can at once be transformed into a benevolent institution, 

 what interest will a man not find in the development of his 

 intelligence!' 



" These reflections of a celebrated woman apply with full 

 justice to all the enterprises of a philanthropist whom we have 



* Tenth Essay, Chap. XIV. f Science et Arts, Vol. XIV. 



