discriminations of temperature was obtained, to which appropriate terms were annexed, explanatory of its effects, or according with the feelings; as burning, scorching, scalding, blistering hot;--descending to blood, loo, gently, or agreeably warm. The ear was not exempted from its share of information, by detecting the boiling of water, or by discovering when a heated metal was immersed in that fluid, that it was hissing-hot: even the smell detected some obscure traces, sufficient to discourage or invite an approach. These tests, although they might serve for ordinary purposes, were still wholly inadequate for philosophical accuracy. To ascertain quantity, it was necessary to associate number as the index of precision. Notwithstanding the construction of this instrument now appears so simple and easy of contrivance, it is only within a few years that it occurred to fill a tube, having a bulb, with a fluid; and to note the points at which snow dissolved, and water boiled: when these were fixed, the intermediate space might form a scale according to any subdivisions, so as to endow it with precision by the adjunct of numbers. On many occasions, our sensations deceive us, especially in a morbid state of the body: a person in the cold stage of an ague shivers at the temperature that oppresses his attendant with heat; but the instrument described is subject to no variations, by marking the gradations of warmth with the definite character of number. It will now be seen, that man possesses materials for conducting his reasonings, which animals do not enjoy;--by language, and from his capacity of numerating. Speech, of course, involves its record, whereby he can recall the transactions of former ages, and preserve the fruit of experience for his intellectual nurture, when the tree that produced it has perished. This record is the elaboration of the hand,--that wonderful instrument, the register of thought,--that active and and skilful agent that "turns to shape" the contrivances of the mind.