The _physical sciences_, shewing the composition and defects of soils, and the modes of remedying those defects--the natures and properties of minerals and vegetables--the modes in which different bodies affect each other--the mechanical powers--the structure of man's own frame, and the causes which benefit or injure it--the utility of these cannot escape any mind. For _books_, and _tracts_, and _oral lectures for the people_, there will be no want of materials or models, or even of the actual fabrics themselves. The publications of the British and American Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge, are mines, in which selection, compilation, and imitation, may work with the richest results to this great cause. Many of these productions, and still more eminently, the scientific writings of Dr. Franklin, afford most happy specimens of the style, suited to treatises for popular use: no parade of learning; no long word, where a short will serve the turn; no Latin or Greek derivative, where an Anglo-Saxon is at hand; no technical term, where a popular one can be used. By presenting, in a form thus brief, simple, and attractive, subjects which in their accustomed guise of learned and costly quartos or octavos, frighten away the common gaze, as from a Gorgon upon which none might look, and live, you may insinuate them into every dwelling, and every mind: the school urchin may find them neither incomprehensible, nor wearisome; and the laboring man be detained from the tippling house, and even for an hour, after the day's toil is over, from his pillow, to snatch a few morsels from the banquet of instruction. Many will cavil at the attempt to disseminate generally, so extended a round of knowledge: and if, to escape the charge of _impracticability_, we say, that our aim is to impart merely a slight and general acquaintance with the proposed subjects,--then, _sciolism_, and _smattering_, will be imputed to the plan; and Pope's clever lines, so often misapplied, about the _intoxicating effect of shallow draughts from the Pierian Spring_, will be quoted upon us. Come the objection in prose or in verse, it is entirely fallacious.