538 MEMOIR OF 



whose names can never be listened to in this place without 

 emotion : 



" Dear Sir, 



" I have read over your paper with the greatest pleasure. 

 The composition is what it ought to be, simple, elegant, and 

 perfectly perspicuous, and will be a very great ornament to our 

 Memoirs. Some of my chemical friends, however, are of opi- 

 nion, that the degree of vitrification which takes place in the 

 specimens of these forts, is too great to be the effect of any ac- 

 cidental fire, such as you suppose, and could be produced only 

 by a great accumulation of wood, heaped upon the wall after 

 it was built. This is a subject of which I am ignorant. You 

 had convinced me, who fancied that this imperfect vitrification 

 was more likely to be the effect of accident than of knowledge. 

 The friends I mean, are Dr Black and Dr Hutton, who in 

 every other respect entertain the same high opinion of your 

 composition which I do. You had better converse with them : 

 you may convince them, or they may convince you ; and even 

 though neither of these two events should happen, the offence, 

 I apprehend, will not be great, either to them or to you. I 

 have the honour to be, &c. 



" Adam Smith." 



In the year 1790, Mr Tytler read in the Society those pa- 

 pers on Translation, which they who heard them will remem- 

 ber to have been listened to with so much pleasure, and which 

 he soon after published without his name, and under the mo- 

 dest title of an Essay on the Principles of Translation. The 

 work was scarcely published, when it occasioned a correspon- 

 dence with the late learned and ingenious Dr Campbell, Prin- 

 cipal 



