he seasons but combined in forms of beauty
and variety; creating out of the dust of the earth from the clay under
his feet instruments of use and ornament; extracting metals from the rude
ore and giving to them a hundred different shapes for a thousand
different purposes; selecting and improving the vegetable productions
with which he covers the earth; not only subduing but taming and
domesticating the wildest, the fleetest, and the strongest inhabitants of
the wood, the mountain, and the air; making the winds carry him on every
part of the immense ocean; and compelling the elements of air, water, and
even fire as it were to labour for him; concentrating in small space
materials which act as the thunderbolt, and directing their energies so
as to destroy at immense distances; blasting the rock, removing the
mountain, carrying water from the valley to the hill; perpetuating
thought in imperishable words, rendering immortal the exertion of genius,
and presenting them as common property to all awakening minds, becoming
as it were the true image of divine intelligence receiving and bestowing
the breath of life in the influence of civilization.

_Eub_.--Really you are in the poetical, not the chemical chair, or rather
on the tripod. We claim from you some accuracy of detail, some minute
information, some proofs of what you assert. What you attribute to the
chemical and mechanical arts, we might with the same propriety attribute
to the fine arts, to letters, to political improvement, and to those
inventions of which Minerva and Apollo and not Vulcan are the patrons.

_The Unknown_.--I will be more minute. You will allow that the rendering
skins insoluble in water by combining with them the astringent principle
of certain vegetables is a chemical invention, and that without leather,
our shoes, our carriages, our equipages would be very ill made; you will
permit me to say, that the bleaching and dying of wool and silk, cotton,
and flax, are chemical processes, and that the conversion of them into
different clothes is a mechanical invention; that the working of iron,
copper, tin, and lead, and the other metals, and the combining them in
different alloys by which almost all the instruments necessary for the
turner, the joiner, the stone-mason, the ship-builder, and the smith are
made, are chemical inventions; even the press, to the influence of which
I am disposed to attribute as much as you can do, could not have existed
in an