The present volumes, however, are not the less valuable on this account. They contain many of the most noted and some of the best compositions of the author. Among other articles of interest we have the celebrated “Discourse on the Objects, Pleasures and Advantages of Science”—a title, by the way, in which the word “pleasures” is one of the purest supererogation. That this discourse is well written, we, of course, admit, since we do not wish to be denounced as blockheads; but we beg leave to disagree, most positively, with the Preface, which asserts that “there was only one individual living by whom it could have been produced.” This round asseveration will only excite a smile upon the lips of every man of the slightest pretension to scientific acquirement. We are personally acquainted with at least a dozen individuals who could have written this treatise _as well_ as the Lord Chancellor has written it. In fact, a discourse of this character is by no means difficult of composition—a discourse such as Lord Brougham has given us. His whole design consists in an unmethodical collection of the most _striking_ and at the same time the most _popularly comprehensible facts_ in general science. And it cannot be denied that this plan of demonstrating the advantages of science as a whole _by detailing insulated specimens of its interest_ is a most unphilosophical and inartistical mode of procedure—a mode which even puts one in mind of the σκολαστικος offering a brick as a sample of the house he wished to sell. Neither is the essay free (as should be imperatively demanded in a case of this nature) from very gross error and mis-statement. Its style, too, in its minor points, is unusually bad. The strangest grammatical errors abound, of which the initial pages are especially full, and the whole is singularly deficient in that precision which should characterise a scientific discourse. In short, it is an entertaining essay, but in some degree superficial and quackish, and could have been _better_ written by any one of a multitude of living _savans_.