too, I can tell you. He blowed a blast on a former occasion that rather made the French look small, I know. These chaps must be looked up. I wish I had that Italian picture fellow here, wouldn't I make him a caution to look at, that's all! And that Latin speechifier too. But the other man was a good fellow-a good fellow-a mountainous fellow, as our Emerson says."

'So he ran on, and tiresome enough it was to hear him, I can tell you. But I went down into town shortly after, and there I found something new. I was going to the Bibliothéque Nationale, as it was then called, but when I came to the Boulevards, I found there fellows beginning to throw up a barricade. In short, the insurrection of June had begun, and I soon fully understood the hints of the three brethren, and why they did not care for discovery now. They had, I plainly saw, been aware of the approaching outbreak, and were probably implicated

in it.

That day and the day after I went about Paris to see and hear as much as I could, and much indeed there was both to be seen and heard. But I need not now speak of an affair about which you probably heard enough at the time. The next day I left my American asleep (he knew nothing of what was going on, for, as he was feverish enough already, I concealed the news from him, and he kept his bed), and going to the Barrière, I tried to penetrate again into Paris. But now they would not let me through without a pass from some authority or another, and of course I had none. So I went to the top of the Butte Montmartre, to see what was to be seen from that point. It was a beautiful day, a Sunday, and I thought how at home church bells would be ringing, and people would be going peacefully to prayer about that time. From the hill, though it commands a view of the whole city, I could form no idea how the general fight was going on; the only indications were wreaths of smoke now and then rising apparently from about the Place de la Bastille, and the dull boom of occasional cannon from the same quarter. I saw, however, that the insurgents had lost much of the ground they had originally held. But almost at my feet there was a sharp contest going on in what was then called the Clos St Lazare, a piece of ground covered at the time with building materials; so sharp a contest, in

deed, that bullets were whistling past even where I was, with a noise like that made by some of the swift - flying insects. Indeed, whether they were random shots, or whether the rifles I saw in the Abattoir below were really firing on the hill to disperse the people who, like myself, had gone up there to see, and were perhaps supposed to be dangerous, I do not know, but the thing became at last really unpleasant, and I came down again. I did so by the eastern side of the Butte, so as to approach more nearly the scene of action, I was soon among the streets of the suburb, and there, as I turned a corner, I came in contact with a man who was staggering along evidently wounded; to my great surprise, it was the big man of three nights before. He recognised me at once: "Ha!" he said, "you! it's all over with me, brother; I can scarce see-will you help me? Only a few doors from this-it is to my mother I want to go."

'I supported him to a house which he indicated. A poor old woman came to the door when I knocked. She fell down senseless when she saw her son; there was blood on his blouse, his hands were black with powder, and he was of a pale yellow in the face. Not to make a long story of it, I got him into the house. He was now almost fainting, and I stayed with him till he died. He died in less than an hour; he had been shot through the body. He spoke a good deal after a few minutes, and as long as he could; chiefly, however, to his mother, whom he tried to console when she came to herself again; he addressed her very tenderly and with much respect. To me he said, “Poor Luigi, I do not know what has become of him; as for the master of arts, he is dead; the scoundrel was pillaging; plundering in a house, while the battle was raging in the street. When he came out with his booty, I shot him dead on the spot-that's something. Thief that he was!" cried the big man, clenching his fist. He then talked wildly for some minutes on his favourite socialist topics, and then came back again to try and say something to comfort his mother. Speaking fondly to her, and with her poor old hand clasped between both of his, the words gradually came slower and slower, and with more and more difficulty, but ever more and more endearing, and at last, after saying "Pauvre mère-pauvre mère," and heaving a deep sigh, he died.

'A neighbour had come in, and I left the poor woman, promising to return again in a day or two. I did return, of course, after having got rid of the American, of whom I never heard after. Nor was I sorry; for his slang way of speaking, and his style altogether, were quite odious to me, the more so that he had not the excuse that he couldn't help it; for he knew better; but, like many Americans who know better, he managed to make himself very disgusting. I went as I had promised, and saw the poor woman as soon as I could, and was of some little service to her; but she died too, of a broken heart I thought, about six weeks after. One day in the week following that of the insurrection, when I went to see her, I found that Luigi had been there, and had left a note for me. It was couched in rather hyperbolical and otherwise extravagant terms, but showed no little good feeling. After some compliments to me for what I had done for the poor old woman, he said that his life was now altogether a burden to him, and that all would soon be over with him; that he was in hiding, but could not expect to remain longer concealed without compromising the generous people who had sheltered him; that he intended to throw himself that night into the Seine, some distance down the river, so that his body might not be exposed at the Morgue; that he died a martyr to liberty, and only regretted that the struggle in which he succumbed had not been one more directly bearing on Italian liberty; and so farewell, and might I be happier than the unhappy and persecuted Italian had been. Poor fellow! I suppose he did as he said he would. As I observed before, these three men were types of many more among the insurgents of June. But I need not moralise on the text. Don't suppose, however, that I mean to speak of all the insurgents as being criminals, or scoundrels, or even mauvais sujets. Quite untrue are such assertions. A great many of them certainly were bad characters, but that is to be expected in all such cases, and the immense majority were, I am sure, nothing of the kind. To my own knowledge even, there were most respectable characters amongst the mis

guided men. But a terrible day for France, and perhaps for the world, it would have been had they succeeded. Enough, however, of that; my object in telling you this story was simply to show you that masonry may really at times be useful.'

'Your friends were, however, no great ornaments to the body, after all,' said I; though I confess I have a sneaking favour for the big man, and pity the Italian, and might even say in behalf of your master of arts, though in him you have pointed out no redeeming qualities whatever, that all the circumstances which have tended to make a man what he has become should be duly considered before we finally condemn him.'

"That's very charitable, but I confess I see no extenuating circumstances, as the French say, in the case of the seedy nian. But-circumstances! here's a boatful of them coming off to us. Look at that fat woman with her shawl off her shoulders and dipping over the gunwale in the water. Won't she be sorry when she sees. it! And mark the young fellow standing up, and looking so clever and knowing! Won't he just be discomfited when the rope is thrown, and the boat comes in tow! There, I was sure of it! Right over the thwart, and his heels in the air! Oh that there had been a basket of eggs for him to fall into! Pick up the little bits somebody!'

'You don't think, do you,' said I, afterwards, to my friend, that masonry is really turned to political purposes?'

Properly speaking,' replied he, 'it is not, anywhere; and in no sense is it abused in that way among us in this country. But I daresay that abroad it is often used as a cover. Conspirators, I doubt not, often band together under pretence of being masons, when really, if they are masons at all, they are masons and much more. Masonry, of course, is not to be blamed for that, though some despotic governments would fain have it looked upon everywhere with suspicion. There is nothing the use of which may not be abused. But here's the steward advertising dinner. Salt beef and mustard-you may be sure that's the word now at all events. Come along.'

On the Progress and Prospects of Science in Scotland at the close of the Sixteenth and commencement of the Seventeenth Century, as compared with the same at Cambridge a century later: with illustrations of several remarkable coincidences between the genius, the studies, and the discoveries of Napier of Merchiston and Sir Isaac Newton :I HAVE been honoured with a request to contribute a paper touching the antiquities of science in Scotland as compared with its condition at Cambridge of a much later period. Not that I have the slightest pretensions to be considered scientific; but the command of some original documents among the family archives of Napier of Merchiston, the inventor of logarithms, the only philosopher who illustrates Scotland in the great era of Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo, and a closer attention bestowed by myself than by any one else upon the habits and history of this great Scottish worthy, may perhaps enable me at least to amuse, if I do not instruct, you for some portion of an hour.

If Mr Macaulay be right in his estimate of Scotland, even at so late a period as the commencement of the seventeenth century, when our sixth James migrated, nothing loth, to more abounding England, the less we look into our social antiquities, and the more we dwell upon our scientific, the less cause shall we find to blush for our ancestors. That gifted historian, whose mode of announcing new facts is as fearless as it is brilliant, speaking of the comparatively modern era when the union of the crowns had placed the resources of three kingdoms at the command of one monarch, contrasts the condition, intellectual and social, of Scotland with that of Ireland at the same period. Taking his readers by storm with one of his rapid and dazzling generalisations, he thus issues his fiat as to the leading characteristics of Scotland at the commencement of the seventeenth century, the grand era of science :

In mental cultivation, (he says) Scotland had an indisputable superiority. Though that kingdom was then the poorest in Christendom, it already vied in every branch of learning with the most favoured countries. Scotchmen, whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched as those of the Icelanders of our times, wrote Latin verses with more than the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science which would have added to the renown of

Galileo. Ireland could boast of no Buchanan or Napier.

We must be allowed to doubt the historical accuracy of this elegant and laboured antithesis. We are not aware that any such extreme discrepancy between social resources and intellectual powers ever existed in any age or country. We cannot believe that it was the case in Scotland at the commencement of the seventeenth century. We will not accept the compliment, even from Mr Macaulay, at the expense of his banter. An archæological excursion through Edinburgh, indeed through Scotland, under such accomplished guides as a Daniel Wilson or a Robert Chambers, would have been no less instructive to our prime historian than would have been a lecture on the Roman remains, bestowed upon our Prime Minister before the Crimean campaign, according to the intelligent suggestion of Dr Bruce. But the dramatic historian of England, ever fond of pointing his moral and adorning his tale with an illustrious name, has not failed to peril his proposition upon individual instances. then, under the special examples offered. There is no reason to believe that Master George Buchanan, who certainly wrote Latin verses with more than the delicacy of Vida, was ever at a loss for a comfortable lodging and a good dinner. Indeed, he dwelt very much in a palace; and many must have been the regal tit-bits, the savoury crumbs of pasties and preserves, the savoy-amber, the pistache-amber, and the fennel, that adhered to the liquorish moustache of the royal dominie.

We accept his challenge,

not he would have grimly chuckled over so figurative a description of his 'dwell. ings' and his food' as that with which we are favoured, currente calamo, by the most popular writer of the nineteenth century. Merchiston's new order of tillage and pasturage, and especially his instructions for the management of the milk cows on the home-farm, so that they might give double the quantity of rich milk-a system of home-farming set down by himself so early as 1598-suggests no idea of Iceland, as we peruse the placid and pastoral record. Cuyp might have painted from it; and the quaint beards that for generations wagged merrily in those old halls, had grown out of the best of beef and Easter ale, besides 'wild meat,' as game was then designed, comfits, 'fine hetted kit,' and 'chopins of claret wine,' long before the time when, says Mr Macaulay, the intellectual immortality of Scotland dwelt wretchedly in Icelandish huts, and fed on garbage!

But I must not allow this tempting text, although really susceptible of some very curious illustrations to its complete discomfiture, to allure me from the particular subject of the present paper, which belongs to the archæology of science. I propose to look back upon those picturesque times, when the chrysalis of the adept was still hanging upon the brilliant wings of science - when astronomy had not yet escaped from judicial astrology, nor mathematics from magical squares and the mysterious powers of the numbers five and seven, nor chemistry from the alluring promises of faithless Hermes. My purpose is, so far as time will permit, to compare Scotland of that period with Trinity College, Cambridge, a century later. What was doing anent science and philosophical matters in Icelandish Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time when Newton was uncreated dust?

From private papers, as well as from the published records of science, it can be shown that the advent of Newton was being there typified; the way was being there made straight for him, even in what may be called the wilderness of science, a century before he came. The remarkable coincidences between the studies, the discoveries, and the genius of Napier and of Newton, have not attracted even in Scotland that attention which a fact so interesting to the intellectual fame of our country deserves. It can be shown that Napier had surveyed the whole fields of Newton's triumphs with a curious anticipation, indicating a bent of genius singularly coincident with his in all its phases; that he had actually bequeathed both the principle and the nomenclature of Fluxions; that, as regards alchemy, the searching for the

hidden treasures of the earth, and the practical details of the royal mint; arithmetic and algebra; mechanics and catoptrics; the curiosities and refinements of domestic agriculture, and the sacred mysteries of the Prophet Daniel and the Book of Revelations, Napier trod in the very paths, and with no tottering steps, where the march of Newton so majestically followed a century after. These coincidences, indeed, are so striking as to justify the figure, that the antique mirror of the King of Numbers reflected the coming form of the Prince of Mathematicians.

I commence the comparison, and probably will find it necessary to close this reading of it, with the state of alchemy in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as compared with the same at Cambridge, in the hands of Newton, a century later. Even that subject cannot be fully discussed upon this occasion; and I must limit myself, as regards Scotland, to a few illustrations derived from contemporary manuscripts, which have never yet appeared in print.

The first of Napier's manuscripts to be submitted to this venerable assembly discloses, in graphic terms, a very curious scene, occurring in this good town of Edinburgh, precisely two hundred and fortyeight years ago. As the context proves, it was carefully recorded at the time by Napier himself; but the manuscript was lost sight of, and has been too recently recovered to have entered his biography. It need only be further premised that the philosopher, having been installed in the fee of the barony of Merchiston before his father's death, invariably subscribed himself, while his father lived, 'John Napier, fiar of Merchiston :'—

Upon Saturday the 7th of November, 1607, I John Napier, fiar of Merchiston, came to confer with Mr Daniel Muller, Doctor of Medicine, and student in alchemy, anent our philosophical matters. Not knowing that he was sick, and finding that he was diseased of the gout, his ordinary disease, I thought not to have troubled him with much

conference, and meant to have left him for that time; but he, craving conference of me, showed me that he was to have sent for me if I had not of accident come, and that he had a matter to communicate with me, if I might then remain, or shortly return. So I removed my company, and sat down before his bedside. Then he burst fo: th in these words;

tian province at the top of the Adriatic], to bring me hither of crude mercury out of those mines, a long time since, and as yet I have heard no word from him; I think he be dead. I once received a little piece of the earth of those mines, about the quantity of an hizel nut, which, as I brake, there appeared scales of quicksilver within the same, and the crude mercury flowed forth without the fire. With this I perfected the philosophical work, as you may do with the like; for this mercury, being taken with fine silver which never did find fire, and enclosed in a matrix, will become black within the space of forty days, and thereafter will become white; and then is the point and term to loose it if you do not join it with fine gold that never did find the fire, when instantly that which was taken of mercury and luna, or silver, will devour up the gold; and at this conjunction or fermentation endeth the first work. called opus lunæ (the silver operation), and beginneth immediately the second, called opus solis (the go'den operation).

'In this opere solis your work becomes blacker than in opere lunæ, and then white, and at last red. Both these works are performed in a year-to wit, two months and a-ha f in opere lunæ; and nine months and a-half in opere solis.

And for pondera I take nine of crude mercury to one of crude luna (or silver), in primo opere; and this I conjoin with one of sol (or gold) in secundo opere.

'So luna is the medium conjungendi; and hereof cometh three mercuries-to wit, the first, which is mercurius crudus, and is called mercurius frigidus, acetum, mercurius mineralis; the second, which is luna dissolved in crude mercury to the point of whiteness, is called mercurius tepidus, acetum acerrimum, mercurius vegetabilis, quia luna est planta (because silver is the root); the third, which is sol dissolved by the second, is called mercurius calidus, mercurius animalis.

'Further,' said he (Dr Muller), 'the little cipher table, entitled 'Medul'a Philosophiæ Hermetica,' it is mine, for I made it.'

Also he added many discourses, citing texts out of Clangor, Buccinæ, Marsilius, Ripleus, and Arnoldus, to prove the premises, and especially 'De Terra Nigra Occulosa, Terra Hispanica,' &c.

Further, he said that the various hued glass which I did see was in that manner, throughout all its texture, coloured with the stuff which he made in that same glass.

Further, he spake to the triplici usu lapidis, after Paracelsus; first in transmutations of metals; secondly, in curing diseases; and thirdly, it is lapis divinus, for magical us s.

Now, when I heard these things, and had said unto him, My lord, that matter is marvelous, if you be sure of the truth thereof by practice,' he answered, with earnestness, 'In truth I have practised it to the end, and made projection, and found it true.'

Again, when I demanded of him, how it fortuned that he did not multiply his stuff, and keep the same, he answered, I lacked crude mercury, without which it ca not be multipl ed again.'

Upon the 9th of November, I conferred with him again anent some doubts, quod fons trahit regem, e non rex fontem, and so do h aqua-regis; but vulgar mercury, on the contrary, non trahit solem, sed sol eum? He answered, that whatever vulgar mercury or crude mercury do, yet this mercury philosophical, of crude mercury and silver, will instantly drink up gold, and draw it in, initio se

cundi operis. Then I demanded, when should the second work begin, and what was the sign before the point of danger to the work? He answered, that after perfect whiteness in opere primo, there would appear, in an instant, a small hair-like circle surrounding the matter, and attached to the sides of the vessel; then instantly ferment with gold, and it will presently eat up all the gold, and that circle will vanish; but, if you stay longer in fermenting, the work will become all citrine, and more dry than that it can dissolve the gold; for the gold must be sown in terram albam foliatam.

Then I demanded what terra alba foliata was? He answered, that at the point of whiteness, in the first operation, the matter of mercury and luna became like the small scales of a fish. Then I remembered that my father showed me that he made a work which beca ne terra alba foliata, most like the leaves of a book set on edge, of sol, luna, aquaregis, and aqua-fortis.

Upon the 13th day of November, he, being convalesced, showed me that he had feared himself (thought he was dying), and out of affection had revealed these things to me, which, upon his salvation he affirmed to be true, and desired me to confer the sentences of the philosophers together, and I should find them all agree with these premises, which I find apparently very true in their theoretical sentences; but, on the contrary, in their practical precepts, they induce many things repugnant to themselves, to illude the vulgar and profane people, and to divert them from the truth of their former sentences.

Thereafter, about the 15th day of March, 1608, the doctor showed me that he had received glad tidings of the safe return of Lionel Struthers, his said friend, from Histria to England; and he showed me a certain antique figure, with certain verses of congratulation which he had made, and was sending to him in joy of his safe return.

So, within ten days, he came to Edinburgh to the doctor, and brought with him great store of mineral mercury, which never had felt fire, and some unfined, easy to be wrung out from his ore, The doctor gave me, secretly, a small portion both of the one and of the other; as also a very small part of luna mineral unfined; but I purchased more, both of Scotch and German luna. As for sol (gold) mineral, we have enough in Scotland, rests time and opportunity to enterprise the work, with the blessing of God to perform the same, to his glory and comfort of his servants, which the Almighty grant to us, whose holy name be praised and magnified for ever and ever. Amen.

Mr Struthers says that the Spaniards take all the said crude mercury, for it gathers most of mine gold.

This curious document enables us to institute a comparison, in the matter of alchemy, between the author of the 'Logarithmic Fluxions,' and his great antitype, the author of the Fluxionary Calculus.' From it we may gather that Napier, even in his remoter age and ruder country, was, to say the least, as cautious and sceptical in his reliance on the adept, as was Newton in his riper century, at Cambridge. Let us then take a walk, a century later, in Trinity College, Cambridge, that we may not too hastily condemn or deride such investigations as 'follies of the wise.'