Let me explain my artfulness. In a half-jocular section in my first chapter, I invited the reader just to look round his own house and make an inventory of the German goods it probably contains. I helped him with a list of the toys in the nursery, the piano in the drawing-room, the servant’s presentation mug in the kitchen, the pencil on the study table, &c., and then tried to give point and solidity to my little excursion into the lighter style of writing by enumerating the yearly national bill which Germany presents to us for these household items. The correspondent (to use his own admirable verb) “twists” this into the implication above quoted, and writes as though these were the only figures I had adduced. Ingenuous, is it not? THE ALKALI TRADE. Now to another matter wherein the correspondent has superficially scored a point, but has done so largely by the process of quoting me in disconnected bits. I refer to his alkali trade section in the third article. He quotes two or three sentences of mine commenting on some startling English export figures I had just given. Then he misses out a couple of most important pages, and finishes the quotation with two sentences referring to the increase of German trade. This leaving-out of the pith of the matter, and the bringing into juxtaposition of two sets of unrelated semi-rhetorical remarks, gives to the quotation a forced and rather _non sequitur_ air. The part that was left out is too long for me to reproduce, but it comprises a number of most pregnant instances of the havoc wrought in England’s alkali trade, and of the great progress made in the German trade. The correspondent might, with advantage to the forwarding of public knowledge on the subject, have made some reference to these facts, even had it cramped the space at his disposal for inveighing against my “grossly inaccurate impressions.” Here is a case which illustrates the necessity of my appeal to the reader to go direct to the incriminated book. THE CHEMICAL MANURE TRADE.