Many unbelievers have, no doubt, borne with great patience severe calamities; they have suffered death with great fortitude when engaged in a good cause, and many have courted death to serve their friends or their country. It must however be allowed that there is no great merit in meeting death with fortitude when it cannot be avoided, and likewise that the above cases cannot be absolutely calculated upon, as there is no sufficient motive to account for their conduct. But upon a truly practical christian there is the greatest dependance to be placed for acting well in all the situations in which he may be found, his highest interest being connected with the performance of the greatest duties; and even supposing that many persons, who are not christians, from favourable circumstances attendant upon their birth and education, and from a naturally happy temperament of body and mind, may, and, it must be allowed do acquire a habit of disinterested benevolence and may in general be depended upon to act uniformly well in life, still the christian has a decided advantage over them in the hour of death, as to consider death as necessary to his entering upon a new and enlarged sphere of activity and enjoyment, is a privilege that belongs to him alone. APPENDIX, NO. 1. _Of the discoveries in factitious Airs before the time of Dr. Priestley, and of those made by himself._ Dr. Priestley has given a general though brief account[33] of what had been done by his predecessors in this department of experimental Philosophy, and Sir John Pringle in his discourse before the Royal Society on occasion of presenting Dr. Priestley with the Copley Medal in 1772[34] has entered expressly, and more fully into the history of pneumatic discoveries. The same subject was taken up about three years after by Mr. Lavoisier still more at large, in the introduction to his first Vol. of Physical and Chemical Essays, of which a translation was published by Mr. Henry of Manchester in 1776. It is unnecessary to detail here what they have written on the history of these discoveries. It may be observed that no mention is made by any of these gentlemen of an experiment of Mr. John Maud, in July 1736[35], who procured (and confined) inflammable air from a solution of Iron in the vitriolic acid. Inflammable air had been procured from the White Haven coal mines, and exhibited to the Royal Society by Mr. James Lowther, but I do not recollect any notice of its having been collected from a solution of metals in acids, and its character ascertained before Mr. Maud’s experiment; for Hales, though he procured both inflammable and nitrous air, did not examine their properties. But it is much more extraordinary that neither Sir John Pringle who was a Physician, or Mr. Lavoisier who was so much occupied under government, respecting the Theory of the formation, and the practice of manufacturing