notions of these improvements to some, their dulness is humoured and aided by plates, which exhibit the improved apparatus or process to the eye, in such a manner that no eye can fail to comprehend it. He perceives that the book is printed in a cheap and portable form, and that, in populous cities at least, where such instructions are most useful, they are always to be easily had. he walked out and home twenty-six miles in one day, and read the smallest print, without glasses, as distinctly and easily as a boy of sixteen. Till two days previous to his death, he never remembered to have had any complaint or sickness whatever, toothache only excepted. The first fifty-six years of his life passed entirely free from even the toothache, having enjoyed, till then, sound teeth. After that period, his teeth began to decay; but, in the course of fifteen years, a new set appeared, of which he continued in possession till his death. He then naturally infers, that every body is acquainted with these improvements, and has reduced them to practice. He lays down his book, and walks forth to enjoy Of his moral character, it is only the spectacle which a reformation recorded, that he was a steadfastly so entire and so beneficial, in a honest man; sober, regular, and large city, will present to him.- perfectly upright in his deportment. What is his surprise and mortifica- His mind was naturally strong and tion, when he finds that every thing acute, not disciplined by a literary is exactly on its old footing!-education, but enriched by observaRooms are lighted and warmed, victuals are cooked in exactly the same wasteful, dirty, troublesome, and dangerous manner as formerly. Of the middling and higher classes of mankind, there is probably not one in ten whom he does not find familiar with the name of Rumford; but they have no conception of the real nature and utility of his improvements; nor, should you spend hours in enlightening their ignorance, will they move a step towards reducing these improvements to practice, in their own chambers, parlours, or kitchens. For the Literary Magazine. LONGEVITY. THERE died, in February, the present year, at Gloves, near Athenry, in Ireland, of a short illness, Dennis Coorobee, of Ballendangin, aged 117 years. The life of this man was remarkable not only for its duration, but for its exemption from most of the evils of humanity. He retained his mental and corporeal faculties in full vigour to the last. Three weeks before his death, tion and experience. He spent his life in the cultivation of the same farm, the property of which he had acquired early in life, and bent his attention chiefly to agriculture, in which he was generally allowed to be eminently proficient. He was one of the earliest who introduced and propagated the potatoe, which he has cultivated for the last seventy years. We naturally feel some curiosity as to such a man's connection with the other sex, and as to the posterity he leaves behind. We are told that he was seven times married. He was first married at the age of twenty-one. With his last wife, who survived him, he lived longer than with any of the previous ones, that is, twenty-four years, having married her when ninety-three years old. In general, they were short-lived, and were young women of his immediate neighbourhood. The years of his widowhood, taken together, amounted to eleven. All the children born to him were fortyeight, which is, on an average, one in every two years, since the first year of his first marriage. He had three sets of twins, and his third wife bore him eleven children in twelve years. His grand-children were in number two hundred and thirty-six, which is a little more than five to each child. His great-grand-chilaren amounted to nine hundred and forty-four, which is more, proportionally, than six to each grandchild. He had twenty-five greatgreat-grand-children, the oldest of whom is now four years old. Of twelve hundred and fifty-three descendants of his body, four hundred and eighty-seven survived him. By his last wife he had six sons, the youngest of whom is a fine lad of eighteen. These facts are extracted from a register, kept by the old man, of the names, births, marriages, deaths, and general situation of his wives and descendants. The keeping of this register was his principal amusement, and his descendants being scattered far and wide over the earth, he took great pains to make the catalogue exact and complete. It is to be hoped that some curious person may rescue this document from oblivion, by committing it to the press. It must certainly lead to some very valuable inferences, as to the constitution of human bodies, and of human society. It is difficult for one who has only seen thirty years to realize the feelings and experience of one who has seen four times thirty. Still harder must it be to one who has had his customary proportion of infirmity and pain, to conceive the intellectual situation of him who has been utterly a stranger to pain and infirmity for one hundred years together. Every thing must conspire to remind the former of the brevity of life and the frailty of mortality; but it would not be surprising if the latter should gradually admit the notion that he he was wholly unobnoxious to pain or to death. He that enters a battle, for the first time, is greatly alarmed for his safety. If he goes through the day without injury, his terrors begin to subside. If the same good fortune attend him through a great number of successive battles, a kind of un thinking and habitual security and confidence grows upon him. Every new escape is a precedent on which he builds a blind belief of his escaping for the future. His understanding will perhaps readily acknowledge, when the question is put to him, that his chances for subsequent escapes are diminished by every new escape; but there is a wide difference between the habitual conviction and the argumentative assent; and men will always be found to grow confident and wanton, in proportion to the success of their past enterprizes. Thus, the man who has lived a hundred years, without disease or decay, must feel, in spite of reflection or of argument, as if he were exempted, by a peculiar decree, from death or disease, at least another hundred years. It would be impossible for him to make the case of an ordinary mortal his own, or to feel that terror or that sympathy, which grows out of the belief of ourselves being liable to the ills we witness in others. As knowledge is the child of observation and experience, what inestimable opportunities for amassing knowledge would such a long succession of years afford, to a mind enlightened and disciplined! Common men, however industrious or inquisitive, have their hours of improvement continually encroached on by infirmity or disease; but such a man as Mr. Coorobee not only lives a century, but every hour of his life is rendered active and serviceable by health. How many generations must pass before the eyes of such a one! Suppose him to have been born and to have lived in the vicinity of London. He would have seen that vast metropolis almost entirely change its inhabitants four times. Being born in 1688, the year of the revolution, he would be fourteen at the accession of queen Anne; an age when men are capable of noting appearances around them. Four sovereigns have since occupied the throne, of whom the first reigned twelve, the second thirteen, the third thirty-three, and the fourth (grand-son to the third) the old man lived to see accomplish the forty-fourth year of his reign, and the sixty-fifth of his age. Had Dennis Coorobee been a protestant son of James the second, he would have occupied the throne instead of William of Nassau, and been, at the opening of the present year, in full possession of all his faculties, and in quiet and glorious possession of the crown, which he would have worn one hundred and three years. For the Literary Magazine. STATE OF BOOK-MAKING IN GERMANY. THE number of books published in any country, in a given time, is a very inadequate picture of the state of its authors or its literature. All that can be gathered from such statements relates to the extent to which the trade of writing and printing is carried. We may add, indeed, that it throws some light upon the number of readers, since books would not be published but with a view to sell them, and they are read by a great many more than buy them. Such computations have, I believe, never been made in relation to any country but Germany; but Germany is so extensive a country, and so diversified in religion, government, and manners, that any computation of this kind, applicable to the whole empire, can afford very inadequate information as to its real condition. All the presses throughout Germany may, together, annually produce five hundred poems, but Saxony alone may produce four hundred out of the five. Now Saxony is only one tenth of the whole so that if that number be equally distributed throughout the empire, it will communicate only erroneous ideas of the whole. But, notwithstanding these objections, such statements will certainly con siderably amuse, and somewhat instruct us. The prince of Torgoff, in Lusatia, who died the last year, was distinguished by a passionate fondness for books. He formed, in the course a long life, a vast collection of them, and his attention was exercised, not so much in studying their contents, in making them subservient and instrumental to his progress in a particular science, as in ascertaining their history; the names of their authors and publishers; the date and place of their publication; and the department, in a grand analytical system of human knowledge, to which they properly belonged. In this collection were deposited all the works printed in any part of Germany, during ten years, between 1790 and 1800, which the industry of his numerous agents was able to procure. Their number was as follows: cles, the Upper and Lower Saxony, and the Upper and Lower Rhine. As to Suabia, Bavaria, Franconia, and the Austrian territories, the number produced by them must be comparatively small. By this statement it appears, that divinity has produced the greatest number of works: very near ten thousand; so that to write upon theological topics must be more fashionable than to write on any other. Indeed, when we consider the number of the clergy, with their studious course of life, and that to write is part of their profession, we shall not be surprised at the superiority of their numbers in the list of authors. Germany must contain, exclusive of the monastic orders, not less than twenty thousand clergymen. The law is likewise a profession in which books or the pen are the proper instruments or tools. That upwards of four thousand law-books should be produced in ten years, by a profession consisting of not less than twice that number of practitioners, is not very surprising. But what sort of thing is German divinity and German law, which affords an opportunity for so many publications? Desperate must be the lot of these professions, if their members be required to read even the title-pages of all the books annually published in their respective sci ences. Next to theology, geography and history seem to have the greatest number of pens in their service. Belles lettres occupies the third place in the scale. Of these there are more than seven thousand works. Under this appellation, I suppose, is included poetry, novels, and plays. Those who relish that luxurious sort of diet must, therefore, be amply provided for. Alas! how small a part of this poetic and dramatic library will wander beyond the precincts of Germany, or survive the extinction of the present generation. Medicine and surgery seem to be nearly on a par with politics and finance; so that it should appear that the body politic is as carefully attended to, and has as great a number of physicians, as the body natural. These are only a few scores a-head of physics and natural history; which, in their turn, have the advantage, by some hundreds, of philology. Literary history, which, doubtless, comprehends reviews and catalogues, alphabetic and analytic, extends to no less than fourteen hundred publications. When the history of books would form a considerable library, how voluminous must be the library which is formed by the books themselves! But in what a desperate state must be the rising generation, when it stands in need of near a thousand systems of education! For the Literary Magazine. MADRAS AND PHILADELPHIA COMPARED, AS TO CLIMATE. THE exaggerations and mistakes of travellers have been a theme of common declamation these some hundred years; but when the frequency of these mistakes is considered, we shall readily excuse the repetition. I do not mean, at present, to renew the topic, or to point out the ill consequences that sometimes spring from these misrepresentations, but merely to add ancther and a lively example of this spirit, into which travellers are misled by their own partial views or individual feelings. I lately had an opportunity of conversing with a person who_had spent a year at Madras. From him I received the following account of the climate, in which, however incredible it may appear, I saw nothing but what I had often seen before, in the books of English travellers in India. According to this person's account, the climate is tolerable during spring, but in the month of May the weather becomes so intensely hot and disagreeable, that one cannot, with the smallest degree of pleasure, sit down to any occupation, being under the necessity, even at table, of having a handkerchief placed on each side to wipe away the excessive perspiration. The land-winds are frequently so violent as to unroof houses and raise small cattle into the air. Indeed I have myself found it difficult to keep my legs when caught in one of those whirlwinds. When they are seen approaching, all doors and windows are instantly barricadoed, to prevent suffocation from sand and dust, and having every thing in the house rendered useless. I have been of a party when one of those tornadoes forced us to enclose ourselves in this manner, and to sit down by candle-light to dinner, which ren dered the heat intolerably suffocating. Notwithstanding the manner in which the doors and windows were thus blocked up, the sand and dust was forced by the wind through many imperceptible crevices, and fell so thick upon our plates as to be taken up upon a point of a knife like pounded pepper. The land-winds are lulled towards evening; and before it is midnight become quite cold. This transition is very unwholesome, and if a person sleeps where there is a strong draught of air, which a stranger is naturally led to do from the heat, he will, in all probability, lose the use of his limbs before morning upon the side exposed to the wind. Some people in this season change their linen three or four times a-day, which is labour in vain; as that newly put on becomes as moist in one minute as the former; and the heat relaxing a person so much that he becomes quite feeble and exhausted before the operation of shifting is completed. Some are, however, agreeably refreshed in the morning by having several pots of cool water thrown over them as they rise from their beds; but this is only a temporary relief. Those who wear wigs most certainly enjoy this luxury in greater perfection than with the natural hair. A stranger must be very cautious how he bathes in the open air; for, before he can re-dress himself, he is liable to have the skin of his back entirely stripped off by the sun in which case it must be immediately anointed with oil or spirits. The heat of the sun is not the only oppression felt at this season of the year, there being a wind which regularly blows strong from the land for four months without ceasing, that in the day-time conveys a burning heat, and during the night occasions quite a contrary sensation. I may compare the feeling, arising from a gust of those scorching winds, to that of thrusting one's face into the door of a heated oven; and it instantly cracks the skin in the most painful manner. These gales are seen some time before they arrive, driving furiously from the west in great whirlwinds and tornadoes, raising, to the very heavens, sand, and every thing else which they encounter, in awful clouds and pillars of dust. After listening to this account, one very naturally concludes that the country is either quite uninhabitable, or that the people are obliged to use such precautions against heat, for the greatest part of the year, as to make their lives, for that period at least, both useless and burdensome. Proceeding, however, to put new questions to my friend, I was informed, of what indeed is generally known, that the city, whose atmosphere is thus described, is crowded with some hundred thousands of people, who are, with the exception of one in a hundred, busy and dexterous artizans and shopkeepers, who pass active and long lives in constant exercise; who have neither money nor leisure to provide themselves a shelter from these showers of sand, these clouds of insects, or this intolerable sun. That the neighbouring country is highly peopled and cultivated by peasants, who have no defence against these evils but huts of reeds and cotton |