"Our brethren of New England use Choice malefactors to excuse, And hang the guiltless in their stead, Of whom the churches have less need; As lately happened, in a town Where lived a cobbler, and but one, That out of doctrine could cut use, And mend men's lives as well as shoes. This precious brother having slain, In times of peace, an Indian, Not out of malice, but mere zeal (Because he was an infidel), The mighty Tottipottymoy Sent to our elders an envoy, Complaining loudly of the breach Of league held forth by Brother Patch, Against the articles in force Between both churches, his and ours, For which he craved the saints to render Into his hands, or hang the offender; But they, maturely having weighed They had no more but him o' th' trade (A man that served them in the double Capacity to teach and cobble), Resolved to spare him; yet to do The Indian Hoghan Moghan too Impartial justice, in his stead did Hang an old weaver that was bedrid." In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature, and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march and a conquest to-morrow, becomes through indolence a barrack and a prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain others. The physiologist Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. "I have been employed," he says, "six months on the _Cetacea_; I understand the osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the combination with the human head so well, that everybody now appears to me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. Women, the prettiest in society, and those whom I find less comely, they are all either narwhales or porpoises to my eyes." I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a dying condition, when I met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling in his eyes. "And how is my friend, the reverend Doctor?" I inquired. "O, I saw him this morning; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever seen: face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms perfect." And he rubbed his hands with delight, for in the country we cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the books. I think there is malice in a very trifling story which goes about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it to contain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural History Society. It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet. "That letter is A," said the teacher; "A," drawled the boy.