The gentleman, who at this moment takes the highest station among the philosophers of the Athens, and who would have been entitled to no mean place even when her philosophy was in the zenith of its splendour, is of humble though highly respectable extraction. His father rented a small farm in the kingdom of Fife, and had it not been that accident revealed the genius of the infant philosopher, first to the village parson, next through his advice to learned professors of St. Andrew’s, and, lastly, through the wisdom of that advice, to the world at large, his experiments might have been confined to composts for the fields, instead of compositions for the furtherance of science; and his speculations, instead of grasping the globes of the earth and the heavens, might never have soared above a globe-turnip. That the loss that science would thus have sustained would have been great, even the enemies of the philosopher (and there is no philosopher without enemies, especially in the Athens) must allow; for the lines of his discovery have not only been boldly drawn, but have been drawn in situations which no other philosopher has attempted. If, therefore, the discovery which I am about to relate, singular as those who are not conversant with the modes in which genius, when left to itself, developes itself, may consider it to be, had not been made, a blank page would have remained in the book of knowledge, which is now full and fair in its characters of wisdom. The future philosopher, as was once the case with nearly all the nascent philosophers of Scotland, and may still be the case with a few, not the worst of them, divided the year between the study of learning, and the observation of nature. When winter had spoiled the fields of their beauty, and driven the shepherds and cow-herds into the villages, he went to school, where the Proverbs of Solomon, Ruddiman’s Rudiments of the Latin Tongue, and Dilworth’s Arithmetic, by turns expanded his wisdom, or perplexed his ingenuity; and when the fields were again in flower and the birds in song, he was sent forth to observe the progress of vegetable and animal life, notice the revolutions of suns, and feel the practical philosophy of wind and rain. In order that there might be economy as well as information in his employment during the latter season, he was enjoined to attend to the movements of his father’s cows, as well as to those of nature; and until he had reached nearly the end of his twelfth year, it remained doubtful whether cattle or causation was to be the future business and glory of his life. In the summer of that year, however, the die was cast, and never was turning-up more philosophically fortunate, or more fortunate for philosophy. In one of those village libraries, which often contained more rich variety of lore than is to be found among the countless volumes of even an Athenian repository of books, he had found a thumbed and boardless copy of Simpson’s Euclid, which might