both their own sides and poked their neighbours. ‘Driving Cloud’ or other of the Ojibbeway Indians if let loose in Clare-Market, would hardly have been made to feel his conspicuousness more signally than our traveller. There was neither privacy, place, nor pity, for the Brown Hat in Friesland. Therefore, the wisest of these in advising his son, may have meant to say to him, ‘Never throw your oddity in the teeth of other men’s oddities.’ You cannot expect immunity for your own whims, if you force them upon other people’s whims. Never expect that your ‘_ism_’ will find quarter among their ‘_isms_;’ or (to put the adage otherwise) he may have desired to recommend a reading backwards of the old maxim—worn threadbare, rather by trampling upon, than by carrying about, to wit—‘Live, and let live.’ If then you would live a quiet life in Friesland, NEVER WEAR A BROWN HAT! ALCHEMY AND GUNPOWDER. The day-dream of mankind has ever been the Unattainable. To sigh for what is beyond our reach is from infancy to age, a fixed condition of our nature. To it we owe all the improvement that distinguishes civilised from savage life,—to it we are indebted for all the great discoveries which, at long intervals, have rewarded thought. Though the motives which stimulated the earliest inquiries were frequently undefined, and, if curiously examined, would be found to be sometimes questionable, it has rarely happened that the world has not benefited by them in the end. Thus Astrology, which ascribed to the stars an influence over the actions and destinies of man; Magic, which attempted to reverse the laws of nature, and Alchemy, which aimed at securing unlimited powers of self-reward; all tended to the final establishment of useful science. Of none of the sciences whose laws are fully understood, is this description truer than of that now called Chemistry, which once was Alchemy. That ‘knowledge of the substance or composition of bodies,’ which the Arabic root of both words implies, establishes a fact in place of a chimera. Experimental philosophy has made Alchemy an impossible belief, but the faith in it was natural in an age when reason was seldom appealed to. The credulity which accepted witchcraft for a truth, was not likely to reject the theory of the transmutation of metals, nor strain at the dogma of perpetual youth and health;—the concomitants of the Philosopher’s Stone.