that caprice has created, or a subtle discrimination helped to multiply. These are the materials out of which scholastic metaphysicians have fashioned their unresembling model, and deserted Nature. It is not intended in this abbreviated essay to settle the pretensions of these numerous faculties, the discussion of which would require an ample volume: and the award might probably be protracted, till the claim was forgotten. When we contemplate the dexterities that the hand performs, and the monuments of skill and taste that it has elaborated; it would only create unnecessary distinctions to affirm that it possessed the faculties of sculpturing, painting, writing, spinning, weaving, sewing, and numberless other manipulations: besides those that ulterior discoveries may enable it to accomplish. However profuse these constructors of the mind may have been in the accumulation of its component faculties, they appear to have little regarded language, its most prominent and important feature; _the universal menstruum of intelligence, and accredited currency for the circulation and exchange of thought_. There are two faculties or capacities that are peculiar to the human intellect, by which our species has attained a supremacy that leaves all other animated beings in a distant rear: the possession of which has rendered man a progressive being, and the race of animals so nearly stationary, that however they may be tortured into improvement, they feel no emulation to proceed, and the acquirement perishes where the brute expires. These undisputed faculties are Speech, with its recording characters, and the comprehension of numbers, the powerful sources of that pre-eminence which man has already attained, and to which he must be indebted for his further advancement.