"Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will _speak_ to thee!" and will endeavour to ascertain the _philosophy_ of those communications, as Newton did with the recorded data and phenomena of the mechanical or material universe. Whether the transcripts of some of the voluminous unpublished writings of Dionysius Andreas Freher, deposited in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 5767-5792.), will assist the inquirer in his investigations, we cannot confidently state; but in them he will find continual references to what Jacob Böhme terms "the eternal and astral magic, or the laws, powers and properties of the great Universal Will-Spirit of the two co-eternal worlds of darkness and light, and of this third or temporary principle." Freher was the principal illustrator of the writings of the celebrated Jacob Böhme, now exciting so much interest among the German literati; and, if we may credit William Law, it was from the principles of this remarkable man that Sir Isaac Newton derived his theory of fundamental powers. (See "N. & Q.," Vol. viii., p. 247.) But on this and other matters we may doubtless expect to be well informed by Sir David Brewster, in his new "Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton." According to Law, the two-fold spiritual universe stands as near, and in a similar relation to this material mixed world, of darkness and light, evil and good, death and life, or rather the latter to the former, as water does to the gases of which it is essentially compounded.--ED.] * * * * * STARVATION. (Vol. ix., p. 54.) Until your correspondent Q. designated the word _starvation_ as "an Americanism," I never had the least suspicion that it was obtained from that source. On the contrary, I remember to have heard some thirty or forty years ago, that it was first employed by Harry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville, who might have spoken with a brogue, but whose despatches were in good intelligible English. I once asked his son, the second Viscount, whose correctness must be fresh in the recollection of many of your readers, if the above report was true, and he seemed to think that his father had coined the word, and that it immediately got into general circulation. My impression is, that it was already current during the great scarcity at the end of the last, and the commencement of this century; but the dictionary makers, those "who toil at the lower employments of life," as old Sam Johnson termed it, are not apt to be alert in seizing on fresh words, and "starvation" has shared in the general neglect.