[4] Dr. Kirwan, late President of the Royal Irish Academy, who had travelled much on the continent of Europe, used to relate, when speaking of the difficulty of introducing improvements in the arts and manufactures, and of the prejudices entertained for old practices, that, in Normandy, the farmers had been so long accustomed to the use of plough's whose shares were made entirely of WOOD that they could not be prevailed on to make trial of those with IRON; that they considered them to be an idle and useless innovation on the long-established practices of their ancestors; and that they carried these prejudices so far as to force the government to issue an edict on the subject. And even to the last they were so obstinate in their attachment to ploughshares of wood that a tumultuous opposition was made to the enforcement of the edict, which for a short time threatened a rebellion in the province.--PARKES, Chemical Essays, 4th Ed. 473. [5] EDOUARD FOURNIER, Vieux-Neuf, i. 339. [6] Memoires de l' Academie des Sciences, 6 Feb. 1826. [7] Farmer's Magazine, 1817, No. ixxi. 291. [8] Vieux-Neuf, i. 228; Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 742. [9] Vieux-Neuf, i. 19. See also Inventa Nova-Antiqua, 803. [10] Mr. Hallam, in his Introduction to the History of Europe, pronounces the following remarkable eulogium on this extraordinary genius:--"If any doubt could be harboured, not only as to the right of Leonardo da Vinci to stand as 'the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which probably no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record." "Unpublished MSS. by Leonardo contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr. Hallam, "within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge." [11] The plate is now to be seen at the Museum of Patents at South Kensington. In the account which has been published of the above discovery it is stated that "an old man of ninety (recently dead or still alive) recollected, or recollects, that Watt and others used to take portraits of people in a dark (?) room; and there is a letter extant of Sir William Beechey, begging the Lunar Society to desist from these experiments, as, were the process to succeed, it would ruin portrait-painting."