son, is to give a hundred thousand
pounds. Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds,
tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see
all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now
look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in
one's face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for
perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least
conception! If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have
all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:
some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and
Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors,
that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics. But as these
great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to
hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the
learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present
knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been
called so. I don't think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself,
and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like
my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to
Boyle, "had the art of inventing arts:" or rather like a Marquis of
Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls "A Century
of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do
impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the
machines themselves.

[Footnote 1: It is worth noting that these predictions that "it will be
common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old" has been verified
many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large
elms and ashtrees. In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the
House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing
on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851,
and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many
trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and
similarly the "making of trout rivers" has been carried out in many
places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland's method of
raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places
where they were needed.]

[Footnote 2: Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth ce