in any of his senses, or any abatement of the vigour of his mind. Consistent with the above was his declaration that, excepting the want of the society of Mr. L, Mr. B. and two or three other particular friends, which however was made up to him, in some, though in a small degree by their regular correspondence, he had never upon the whole spent any part of his life more happily, nor, he believed, more usefully. The first part of his illness, independent of his general weakness, the result of his illness in Philadelphia in 1801, was a constant indigestion, and a difficulty of swallowing meat or any kind of solid food unless previously reduced by mastication to a perfect pulp. This gradually increased upon him till he could swallow liquids but very slowly, and led him to suspect, which he did to the last, that there must be some stoppage in the œsophagus. Latterly he lived almost entirely upon tea, chocolate, soups, sago, custard puddings, and the like. During all this time of general and increasing debility, he was busily employed in printing his Church History, and the first volume of the Notes on Scripture; and in making new and original experiments, an account of which he sent to the American Philosophical Society in two numbers, one in answer to Dr. Darwin’s observations on Spontaneous generation, and the other on the unexpected conversion of a quantity of the marine acid into the nitrous. During this period, likewise, he wrote his pamphlet of Jesus and Socrates compared, and re-printed his Essay on Phlogiston. He would not suffer any one to do for him what he had been accustomed to do himself; nor did he alter his former mode of life in any respect, excepting that he no longer worked in his garden, and that he read more books of a miscellaneous nature than he had been used to do when he could work more in his laboratory, which had always served him as a relaxation from his other studies. From about the beginning of November 1803, to the middle of January 1804, his complaint grew more serious. He was once incapable of swallowing any thing for near thirty hours; and there being some symptoms of inflammation at his stomach, blisters were applied, which afforded him relief; and by very great attention to his diet, riding out in a chair when the weather would permit, and living chiefly on the soft parts of oysters, he seemed if not gaining ground, at least not getting worse; and we had reason to hope that if he held out until spring as he was, the same attention to his diet with more exercise, which it was impossible for him to take on account of the cold weather, would restore him to health. He, however, considered his life as very precarious, and used to tell the physician who attended him, that if he could but patch him up for six months longer he should be perfectly satisfied, as he should in that time be able to complete printing his works. The swelling of his feet, an alarming symptom of general debility, began about this time.