[2] Mr. Schlosser, who speaks English, who has read rather too much English for any good that he has turned it to, and who ought to have a keen eye for the English version of his own book, after so much reading and study of it, has, however, overlooked several manifest errors. I do not mean to tax Mr. Davison with, general inaccuracy. On the contrary, he seems wary, and in most cases successful as a dealer with the peculiarities of the German. But several cases of error I detect without needing the original: they tell their own story. And one of these I here notice, not only for its own importance, but out of love to Schlosser, and by way of nailing his guarantee to the counter--not altogether as a bad shilling, but as a light one. At p. 5 of vol. 2, in a foot-note, which is speaking of Kant, we read of his _attempt to introduce the notion of negative greatness into Philosophy. Negative greatness!_ What strange bird may _that_ be? Is it the _ornithorynchus paradoxus_? Mr. Schlosser was not wide awake _there_. The reference is evidently to Kant's essay upon the advantages of introducing into philosophy the algebraic idea of _negative quantities_. It is one of Kant's grandest gleams into hidden truth. Were it only for the merits of this most masterly essay in reconstituting the algebraic meaning of a _negative quantity_ [so generally misunderstood as a _negation_ of quantity, and which even Sir Isaac Newton misconstrued as regarded its metaphysics], great would have been the service rendered to logic by Kant. But there is a greater. From this little _brochure_ I am satisfied was derived originally the German regeneration of the Dynamic philosophy, its expansion through the idea of polarity, indifference, &c. Oh, Mr. Schlosser, you had not _gepruft_ p. 5 of vol. 2. You skipped the notes. [3] '_Little nurse_:'--the word _Glumdalclitch_, in Brobdingnagian, absolutely _means little nurse_, and nothing else. It may seem odd that the captain should call any nurse of Brobdingnag, however kind to him, by such an epithet as _little_; and the reader may fancy that Sherwood forest had put it into his head, where Robin Hood always called his right hand man 'Little John,' not _although_, but expressly _because_ John stood seven feet high in his stockings. But the truth is--that Glumdalclitch _was_ little; and literally so; she was only nine years old, and (says the captain) 'little of her age,' being barely forty feet high. She had time to grow certainly, but as she had so much to do before she could overtake other women, it is probable that she would turn out what, in Westmoreland, they call a, _little stiffenger_--very little, if at all, higher than a common English church steeple.