le of his on
the malt tax, for the next number of the _Edinburgh Review_. Nothing was
wanting except the title of the book reviewed; I asked what it was. He sat
down, and wrote as follows at the head, "The Maltster's Guide (pp. 124),"
and said that would do as well as anything.

But I myself, it will be remarked, have employed such humor as I can
command "in favor of establishment." What it is worth I am not to judge; as
usual in such cases, those who are of my cabal pronounce it good, but
cyclometers and other paradoxers either call it very poor, or commend it as
sheer buffoonery. Be it one or the other, I observe that all the effective
ridicule is, in this subject, on the side of establishment. This is partly
due to the difficulty of quizzing plain and sober demonstration; but so
much, if not more, to the ignorance of the paradoxers. For that which
cannot be _ridiculed_, can be _turned into ridicule_ by those who know how.
But by the time a person is deep enough in _negative_ quantities, and
_impossible_ quantities, to be able to satirize them, he is caught, and
being inclined to become a _user_, shrinks from being an _abuser_. Imagine
a person with a gift of ridicule, and knowledge enough, trying his hand on
the junction of the assertions which he will find in various books of
algebra. First, that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly, that a
{320} negative quantity has no square root; thirdly, that the first
non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle to its
diameter. One great reason of the allowance of such unsound modes of
expression is the confidence felt by the writers that [root]-1 and log(-1)
will make their way, however inaccurately described. I heartily wish that
the cyclometers had knowledge enough to attack the weak points of
algebraical diction: they would soon work a beneficial change.[689]

AN EARLY METEOROLOGIST.

Recueil de ma vie, mes ouvrages et mes pensees. Par Thomas Ignace Marie
Forster.[690] Brussels, 1836, 12mo.

Mr. Forster, an Englishman settled at Bruges, was an observer in many
subjects, but especially in meteorology. He communicated to the
Astronomical Society, in 1848, the information that, in the registers kept
by his grandfather, his father, and himself, beginning in 1767, new moon on
Saturday was followed, nineteen times out of twenty, by twenty days of rain
and wind. This statement being published in the _Athenaeum_, a cluster of
corresponde