the observation, 'That
there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?' Whoever he was, it
was a just and good observation in him. But the corollary drawn from it,
namely, 'That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of
odd and whimsical characters;'--that was not his;--it was found out by
another man, at least a century and a half after him. Then again, that
this copious storehouse of original materials is the true and natural
cause that our comedies are so much better than those of France, or any
others that have or can be wrote upon the continent;--that discovery was
not fully made till about the middle of king William's reign, when the
great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces (if I mistake not),
most fortunately hit upon it. Then, fourthly and lastly, that
this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an
irregularity in our characters, cloth thereby in some sort make us
amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with, when the weather
will not suffer us to go out of doors,--that observation is my own; and
was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt
the hour of nine and ten in the morning.

"Thus--thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest of
our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps
of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical,
physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, aenigmatical,
technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with
fifty other branches of it, (most of them ending, as these do, in ical,)
has, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping
upwards towards that acme of their perfections, from which, if we may
form a conjecture from the advantages of these last seven years, we
cannot possibly be far off."

Nothing can be more true, than the proposition ludicrously illustrated
in this passage, that real science is in most instances of slow growth,
and that the discoveries which are brought to perfection at once, are
greatly exposed to the suspicion of quackery. Like the ephemeron fly,
they are born suddenly, and may be expected to die as soon.

Lavater, the well known author of Essays on Physiognomy, appears to
have been born seventeen years before the birth of Gall. He attempted to
reduce into a system the indications of human character that are to be
found in the countenance. Physiognomy, as a subject of ingenious and