al doom of being left
to himself. This latter gentleman is tolerably _shady_ in scientific
matters, nay, to say sooth, light-proof, or only so far penetrable as
to make darkness visible. Between science and nescience the difference
seems to his mind little, if _n e_, and he would accept as perfectly
satisfactory a statement that "the ponderability of air in a vitreous
table-tipping medium (the abnormal variation being assumed as $ x-b
.0000001) is exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient
distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of
nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during
evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of
course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M.
Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment."
The above sentence being shown to the Aesthetic Editor aforesaid, he
acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and
that the theory seems to him as worthy of trial as Hedgecock's quadrant,
which he took with him once on a journey to New York, arriving safely
with a single observation of the height of the steamer's funnel.

[Footnote A: MISS-INFORMATION. A higgledy-piggledy want of intelligence
acquired by young misses at boarding-schools.--_Supplement to Johnson's
Dictionary._]

This premised, it naturally follows that the Aesthetic Editor (the July
number falling to his turn) must take advantage of the absence of
his Guardian Man of Science to publish an article on Meteorology. A
condition of things in which the _omne scibile_ was left entirely at his
disposal, to be knocked about as he pleased, appeared to him no small
omen of a near millennium; and what subject could be more suitable to
begin with than the weather, a topic of general interest, (since we have
no choice of weather or no,) in which exact knowledge is comfortably
impossible, and in which he felt himself at home from his repeated
experiments in raising the wind in order to lower the due-point? (See
_The Weathercock, an Essay on Rotation in Office, by Sir Airy Vane._)

Meanwhile, after the mischief was all done and a Provisional Government
of Chaos Redux comfortably established in Physics, the Man of Science
turns up suddenly in the following communication. [A council was called
on the spot, the Autocrat in the chair, and it was decided, with only
one dissenting voice, that the communication should be printe