Had the fall of Newton's apple been an effect of terrestrial attraction, there should have been some stronger attraction from somewhere above the tree, to make the juices of which the apple was formed ascend from the ground, and capillary cannot be said to be stronger than terrestrial attraction. There is nothing but puzzle, contradiction, and inconsistency, in human opinion, where the natural truth is unknown. Oh! apples, apples, why for discord sent? the first cut short eternal life on earth; another turned "heaven-born reason" to inventing dreams;--that heaven-born reason which tells us every day of its yesterday's mistakes. EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY. The Baconian precept, to "torture Nature out of her secrets," has been, and ever must be, abortive of the good intended. Nature is performing freely and openly every hour, without making us wiser, and as little while she is operating in our own experiments. Her language, of which _inertia_ and _pressure_ are the alpha and omega, is not studied; nor does it mislead or flatter like our own. Experiments innumerable have been performed; the _experimentum crucis_ resorted to; the screw applied to the utmost pinch, without either confession or concealment on Nature's part. Hence, the experimenter is left to make his own philosophy of the case, of which the next operator makes a different; and all are falsely interpreted that violate the principle of inertia, which all do. Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Black, Reid, Davy, Des Cartes, experimented indefatigably under the most favourable auspices,--exalted talent, and the institutions of the world at command; but all on false principles; yet Nature, tortured or not, left them to their own mis-interpretations. Aristotle, true in his opinion of motion, was himself ignorant of the cause of continuous motion, or all would not be so at present. Bacon recommended experiment, without teaching the natural mode of interpretation. Newton spent his valuable time, to the world's great loss, in experimenting on light, in ascertaining and describing its properties, as if there were material light; instead of which, light is a mere sensible effect; hence, a physical nonentity. Black and Reid called to their assistance all the powers of numbers, to ascertain and prove the quantity of heat in the animal system, and of cold in ice; but could not torture Nature out of the information, that heat and cold do not belong to matter or bodies, as a knowledge of the function of the senses could have informed them. Davy travelled to Skehallean to find from the size of the hill, a ratio of attraction, whence to calculate the quantity of attraction in the entire globe of the earth: at home, correctly sought, he would have found, without numerical assistance and the pendulum, that the amount is zero. The deflection of the pendulum was caused by the pressure on one side of the bulb being greater than on the side facing the hill; which, from