However excellent and praiseworthy the intention of the Earl of Bridgewater, and however liberal the sum bequeathed, there can be little doubt that in the wording of his bequest, in the encumbering of the work so nobly proposed with a _specification of the arguments to be employed in its execution_, he has offered a very serious impediment to the fulfilment of the spirit of his design. It is perhaps, too, a matter of regret, that the introduction of the words "person or persons" in the paragraph touching the contemplated publication, should have left it optional with the President of the Royal Society to divide the eight thousand pounds among so many. We are sorry that the eight treatises were determined upon for several reasons. First, we do not believe any such arrangement to have been contemplated by the testator--his words "write, print, and publish one thousand copies of _a work_," &c., inducing the opinion that one single book or treatise was intended: and we the rather hold to this belief, as it might easily be proved (we will speak farther of this hereafter,) that the whole argument set forth in the words of the Testament, and indeed the whole arguments of the whole eight Treatises now published, might have been readily discussed in one connected work of no greater bulk than the _Physiology_ whose title forms the heading of this article. In the second place--the bequest of the eight thousand pounds, which _en masse_, is magnificent, and which might thus have operated as a sufficient inducement for some one competent person to devote a _sufficiency of time_ to the steady and gradual completion of a noble and extraordinary work--this bequest, we say, is somewhat of a common-place affair when we regard it in its subdivision. Thirdly, one thousand pounds is but little for the labor necessary in a work like any one of the Treatises, and we are mistaken if the "profits of the sales" meet in any degree either the merits or the expectations of the respective authors. If they do, however, it is a matter altogether foreign to and apart from the liberality of the testator--a liberality whose proper development should have been scrupulously borne in view by the Trustee. Fourthly--the result of the combination of a number of intellects is seldom in any case--never in a case like the present--equal to the sum of the results of the same intellects laboring individually--the difference, generally, being in precise ratio with the number of the intellects engaged. It follows that each writer of a Bridgewater Treatise has been employed at a disadvantage. Lastly--an accurate examination of the nature and argument of each Treatise as allotted, will convince one _a priori_ that the whole must, in any attempt at a full discussion, unavoidably run one into the other--this indeed in so very great a degree that each Treatise respectively would embody a vast quantity of matter,