fatal efficacy of gunpowder as an agent for the destruction of 
human life surprised the cloistered Bacon. The mirthful 
disporting of the children of an obscure spectacle-maker of 
Aliddleburg, who, by placing two pieces of glass one before 
the other and looking through them, obscrv'ed the weather¬ 
cock on a neighbouring steeple to be magnified, drew the 
notice of the father to rlie fact; who, struck by the singularity 
of the effect, adjusted lenses on a board in brass rings, move- 
able at pleasure,—the first rude attempt at the telescope, the 
instrument which so effectually aided to establish the renoAvn 
of Newton, La Place, and Herschel. The spasmodic convul¬ 
sion of the limbs of a dead frog, caused by the unpremiditated 
contact with two plates of metal, exposed to Galvani the 
premises on which, by a series of successful experiments, he 
built up the principles of animal electricity. While many of 
those by which chemistry has ministered so extensively to the 
convenience and efficiency of medicines, by removing nauseat 
ing or pernicious substances; or to enobling the arts by dis¬ 
closing previously unknown properties in vegetables, minerals, 
acids,or alkalis; in fixing or liberating colours; in ascertaining 
the composition and affinities of the different gases, have 
almost, as it were, obtruded themselves obliquely, and the 
unappropriated ideas which the surge of ever floudng time 
casts upon its bosom have thus allowed themselves to be 
drawn within the eddying verge of that circle which the 
enquirer has disturbed. 
But to turn and view the subject in another light. There 
is no slender enjoyment afforded by the ready concession 
made by intellectual liberality to a demonstration, however 
startling, which stands in direct contradiction to traditional 
error, to the immature^ffsprifig of crude theories which we 
have too readily accepted from others; or to the cherished 
conclusions which we may have rashly draum from ill-con¬ 
sidered or assumed data; and the celerity with which after 
the evidence has been understood and assent granted to the 
new proposition, all pre-existing notions are displaced, and 
the tenacity with which the belief clings to the latter doctrine, 
by which the former has been supplanted, prove incontestably 
