SALTS.

[173] To ascertain the true configurations of salts, particular attention should be paid to obtain them genuine; it may therefore be proper to apprize the reader, that some of those above enumerated are not easily procured in that state; consequently, though they exhibit pleasing figures, yet they may not be those of the real salt purposed to be investigated. Many hundred weights of some salts are annually manufactured, and sold under names very different from what they really are. Nor is this circumstance confined to salts only: for want of botanical knowledge, preparations of different plants have been frequently sold possessed of medical properties very different from those intended. A valuable medicine, the extract of Hemlock, for instance, instead of being prepared of the conium maculatum, has been made in large quantities of the chærophyllum sylvestre, and thus administered! On this unpleasant subject I could enlarge, were it not digressing from that before us. Whilst such evils exist, need we wonder if the physician as well as the patient are often disappointed in the beneficial effects expected from the adhibition of medicines?

PREPARATIONS OF MERCURY.
MISCELLANEOUS.

After having particularized so many of the works of NATURE, let us now pay some attention to those of ART. But what an humiliating contrast shall we meet with! If our design in viewing objects by the microscope be to discover beauty, harmony, and perfection, it will be necessary to limit our inquiries to the former, happily alone sufficiently abundant; if, on the contrary, we are desirous of discovering deformity and imperfection, we must confine ourselves to the latter. Even those works of art that appear to the unassisted eye as decisive proofs of consummate skill in the workman, and which excite our admiration for their apparent neatness and accuracy, when brought to this test, exhibit their real state; and, consequently, tend but to display the inferiority of the most finished performance of the ablest artist, when put in competition with the glorious productions of nature. The finest works of the loom and of the needle, if exhibited with the microscope, prove so rude and coarse, that were they to appear thus to the naked eye, so far from affording delight to our belles, would be rejected with disgust. But the more we inquire into the works of nature, the more fully are we satisfied of their divine origin: in a flower, for instance, we see how fibres too minute for the unassisted sight are composed of others still more minute, till the primordial threads or first principles are utterly indiscernible; whilst the whole substance presents a celestial radiance in its colouring, with a richness so superior to silver or gold, as if it were intended for the cloathing of an angel, and we have the highest authority for asserting, that the greatest monarch of the East in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. A very few specimens of art will, therefore, suffice.

An inspection of a few of the above articles only will clearly demonstrate, that as in the moral and political world, so in the works of art, perfection is unattainable by mortal man. With the fullest impression of which truth in the mind of the editor, and an appeal to the candour of his readers towards those imperfections which they may have discovered in this performance, he shall now conclude with,