Yankees a laughing! The play-house would have been the place for you to go to, where you would have occasioned more entertainment than all the other actors in the scenery. If you had told the Bostonians, as you told me, "that the Cyane was so slow that every merchant vessel ran by her, and that the Levant's officers declared that she could but just outsail her companion," how the Yankees would have laughed! They would have wondered, as I do, first, that there should have been two such ships in that glorious great British navy; second, that "a Douglas," and a Gordon Falcon, should have got into two such ships; and, third, that, being in two such ships, they should have gone in pursuit of the Constitution, with a view to disable her, if not to take her.

I have no room for more, and more, I trust, is not necessary. I cannot, however, conclude without bestowing my serious reprehension on your endeavours to disguise, to gloss over, to palliate, the inglorious acts of which you pretend to have written the history. When a disposition to do this is entertained by a people, that people is manifestly destined to sink. The disposi tion arises from their not daring to look truth in the face. It arises from their consciousness of inability to recover what they have lost. God forbid that such a disposition should become general in England; but if you do not produce this mischievous, dishonourable disposition, it seems to me it will be for want of ability, and not for want of desire. It is invariably the case that the greediness for praise is in an inverse proportion to the merit of the party. Of this you have probably experienced the truth; but there arises a further inconvenience, and that is, when you have begun to bestow unjust praise, you lay the foundation of claim upon you to proceed to all lengths in the same course. After writing the book which you have 'sent to me, and upon which I have made these observations, there is nothing in the way of praise that any officer in the navy has not a right to demand of you; and if you refuse, I see no reason why you should not be liable to his lash.

To the officers of the navy I beg leave to observe, that I deem their profession highly honourable; that I think it ought to be held in great esteem by the people; that I deem the navy of the greatest importance to the country; that I am convinced that it would require the greatest skill and most undaunted courage on their part to enable them to maintain the dominion of the seas; and that to induce them to attain to this skill and to display this courage, they are not, I trust, to be told that a few pounds difference in weight of metal, that

To the government I say, that there must be a new system of promotion, and a new rate and manner of distributing prize money. Captain Dacres was indignant at seeing British seamen on board the American frigate which had beaten and captured him. He was particularly offended at an Irishman, whom he saw sitting coolly making buck-shot to fire at his countrymen. Alas! remember poor Cashman, who was hanged as a rioter, in 1817! Think of his fate and the buck-shot will sink out of your sight Read his address to the judge who condemned him, and the buck-shot will wholly escape from your mind :

"My Lord: I hope you will excuse a poor friendless sailor for occupying your time. Had I died fighting the battles of my country, I should have gloried in it; but I confess that it grieves me to think of suffering like a robber, when I call God to witness that I have passed whole days together without even a morsel of bread, rather than violate the laws. I have served my king for many years, and often fought for my country. I have received nine wounds in the service, and never before have been charged with any offence I have been at sea all my life, and my father was killed on board the Diana frigate. I came to London, my Lord, to endeavour to recover my pay and prize money, but being unsuccessful was reduced to the greatest distress, and being poor and pennyless, I have not been able to bring forward witnesses to prove my innocence, or even to acquaint my brave officers, or I am sure they would all have come forward in my behalf. The gentlemen who have sworn against me must have mistook me for some other person, there being many sailors in the mob; but I freely forgive them, and I hope God will also forgive them, for I solemnly declare that I committed no act of violence whatever."

.

AE H! my dearest Maria Louisa! you who are still enjoying at the Institution the lectures of the most elegant of all professors; you who twice a week have an opportunity of witnessing his ingenious experiments in pneumatics, aërostatics, and hydrostatics, while he explains all the different 'ologies of the alphabet, from anthology to zoology! you who are, perhaps, at this moment inhaling the gas of nitrous oxide or gas of paradise, how do I envy you your sensations and associations! Most joyfully do I sit down to perform my promise of writing an account of my journey to Worthing, not to indulge in the frivolous tittletattle to which so many of our sex are addicted, but to attempt a scientific journal worthy of our studies, and of the opportunities afforded us by our constant attendance at so many of the learned lectures in London. Nothing occurred on the road worthy of particular mention: the indications of the barometer, the mean temperature of the thermometer, and the contents of the pluviometer, will be found in the tables which we have agreed to interchange weekly. In the meadows through which we occasionally passed, I observed several fine specimens of the mammalia class of quadrupeds, such as the bos taurus, or common ox; the ovis aries, of Linnæus, or sheep; the equus caballus, or horse; the asinus, or ass, both Jenny and Jack; and the capræa hircus, or common goat, both Billy and Nanny. By-the-by these vulgar methods of discriminating genders are very unscientific, and may often lead to mistakes. Learned language cannot be too precise.

In the hedges, I recognised some curious flowers, particularly the bellis, of the order polygamia superflua, vulgò the daisy; the cardamine, to which Shakspeare has given the vulgar name of the lady's smock; the caltha, or marigold, with its radiated discous flower, to which the lower orders as

Swift's Letter to a Young Lady. sign a coarser appellation; culverkeys, mentioned in Walton's Angler; mithridate mustard, or charlock; the primula, or primrose; violets, (you remember Shakspeare's sweet lines

"Violets dim,

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath ;")

lolium and fumaria, or darnel and fumatory, ingredients in the wreath of the broken-hearted Ophelia ; together with several fine specimens of the carduus, or common thistle.

On our arrival at Worthing, we dined with our friends the Tomkins family, where we had the scapula of the ovis, or a shoulder of mutton, with a sauce of macerated cepa, two birds of the gallinaceous tribe served with si-symbrium, or water-cresses, and the customary vegetables of brassica, lac tuca, and spinacia, through none of which the aqueous fluid had been sufficiently allowed to percolate. There was also soup which retained so considerable a portion of caloric, that it scalded my palatic epidermis, and the piper nigrum, or black pepper, with which it was seasoned occasioned a very unpleasant degree of titillation in the whole of the oral region. In the afternoon, the water in the kettle not having been raised to 212 of Fahrenheit, or that point at which evaporation commences, the thea viridis, or green tea, formed an imperfect decoction, in which state, I believe, its diaphoretic qualities are injurious. Mrs. Tomkins declared she never drank any thing herself but the simple element; but I informed her that if she meant water, it was by no means a simple element, but compounded of oxygen and hydrogen; and I availed myself of this opportunity for instructing her that atmospheric air is also a mixture, containing about seventy-three parts of azotic, and twenty-seven of oxygen gas, at which the ignorant creature only exclaimed, "Well, I have seen myself a good many red gashes across the sky, particularly at sunset."

She was dressed in a gown woven from the filaments of the phalana bombyx, or silkworm, dyed in a red tincture of the small insect called coccus ilicis by Linnæus, which is found on the bark of the quercus coccifera. By way of changing the conversation, which was turning upon Mrs. T's proficiency in music, I asked her in allusion to the geological controversy, whether she preferred the Vulcanian or the Neptunian systems, when the silly girl replied with a stare that she had not heard of either of the tunes !!

But, my dearest Maria Louisa, I may confess to you, that I am daily more and more horrified by the sad blunders of mamma, who has not, like us, received the benefits of scientific instruction, and yet, while she sits at the window knitting, will every now and then catch a word which she fancies she understands, and betray the most pitiable ignorance in her attempts to join the conversation-For instance, while I was this morning explaining to Miss Tomkins the difference between hydrogen and oxygen, she exclaimed, without taking her eyes from her work, "Well, it's a liquor I never taste my1 self, but in my time Booth's was reckoned the best gin." We had been visiting a house in which I complained of an unpleasant empyreuma. "Child!" cried mamma, "I think an empty room a very unpleasant thing certainly, but you may depend upon it, there was not one in the whole house." While I was maintaining that bismuth and cobalt were different ores, she imagined in her imperfect hearing, and still more deficient comprehension, that I was talking of the two London coaches, and added with a nod, "Yes, my dear, they start at different hours, the Sidmouth at six in the morning, and the Cobourg at eight in the evening." After dinner, I took occasion to observe that cheese was obtained from curd by separating the whey by expression, when she told me there was no way of expression, no, not all the talking in the world, that would ever make a cheese!! Alluding to a short essay I had written upon the reflection of light, she interrupted me by desiring I would not indulge in light reflec

tions, as I should be only subjecting myself to similar remarks from others; and when I was describing a resinous matter obtained by precipitation, she shook her head and exclaimed, "Impossible, child, nothing is ever gotten by precipitation; your poor dear father was always telling you not to do things in such a violent hurry."-Upon my explaining to a friend that antimony derived its name from its having been indulged in too freely by some monks, she cried "There, my dear, you must be mistaken, for monks, you know, can have nothing to do with matrimony ;" and once when the professor showed me a lump of mineral earth, and I enquired whether it was friable, she ejaculated "Friable, you simpleton! no, nor boilable neither; These are why, it isn't good to eat." but a few specimens of her lamentable ignorance; in point of acute misapprehension she exceeds even Mrs.Malaprop herself,and you cannot conceive the humiliation to which I am constantly subjected by these exposures.

As to the experiments, I have not yet ventured upon many, for having occasioned a small solution of continuity in the skin of my forefinger by an accidental incision, I have been obliged to apply a styptic secured by a ligature. By placing some butter, however, in a temperature of 96, I succeeded in reducing it to a deliquescent state; and by the usual refrigerating process, I believe I should have reconverted it into a gelatine, but that it refused to coagulate, owing, doubtless, to some defect in the apparatus. You are aware that a phosphorescent light emanates from several species of fish in an incipient state of putrefaction, to which has been attributed the iridescent appearance of the sea at certain seasons. For the illustration of this curious property, I hoarded a mackarel in a closet for several days, and it was already beginning to be most interestingly luminous, when mamma, who had for some time been complaining of a horrid stench in the house, discovered my hidden treasure, and ordered the servant to toss it on a dunghill, observing that she expected sooner or later to be poisoned alive