shewn above, yet by the late estimates they are found to amount to 11,780,000 only, of which 4,780,000 belong to the government, 4,000,000 to corporations of various sorts, and 3,000,000 to individuals.

They cut one twentieth part of the wood every year, which gives 589,300 acres of woodlands cut down annually, and which is supposed to produce 11,786,000 cords, or 20 cords per acre; and 23,700,000 joists for building.

They calculate the annual value of the wood cut in France at, 120,000,000 francs. This must be at the moment it is felled, not computing the labour or transportation, because it sells at more than 40 livres the cord in Paris. As France is the only country in the world, which has preserved its wood during such a state of population, I think you would like to know the causes of it. The whole wood of the nation, though belonging to individuals or corporations, is under the publick guardianship. There is a complete system of ad

ministration confined to the forests. There are 28 preservers, 166 inspectors, 262 sub-inspectors, 465 general guards, and 6,884 particular guards; whole expense 5,000,000 francs. Produce of publick wood sold annually, 39,835,000 francs.

The proprietors of woods are divided into five classes, of which four are under the absolute controul of the government, and can only cut in the manner, which the officers of the government shall direct. The fifth class, who are individual proprietors, cannot clear their land without the permission of the Minister of the Interior, and who takes into consideration the situation and wants of that part of the country, in which the wood is situated. În all cases, ten trees are to be left in each acre for timber, which cannot be cut till they are 120 years old.

Regulations of this sort would be thought arbitrary in our land of liberty, but they are wise, and conduce to national grandeur and strength. Yours, &c.

EVEN within a few years after its institution, the Society had acquired a considerable library, and a good collection of natural curiosities. A Mr. Colwal was, in these things, one of its first and most munificent benefactors. Mr. Hooke, the first curator of the Society, had the care of the books and curiosities; and they were arranged according to a classification of all the species in nature, contrived by the famous Dr. Wilkins. Mr. Henry Howard be

stowed on the Society the whole Arundelian library, consisting of some thousands of printed books, with several hundreds of choice manuscripts. From the time, also, of the great fire, after which the buildings of Gresham college were again occupied as an exchange, Mr. Howard afforded the Society a place of temporary accommodation in Arundel house.

Among the communications to this Society, within the first seven

years after its incorporation by charter, were many curious theoretical discourses. Such were an hypothesis of the motions of the moon, and of the sea; a theory of fire and flame; an hypothesis of the form and spring of the air; a discourse of the possible height of the air, and its rarefaction upward; a discourse about improving wood for dyeing, and for fixing colours; discourses upon several mercurial experiments; a discourse of annealing and tempering steel; discourses about cyder and coffee; a discourse of the possibility of the retardation of the motions of the heavenly bodies, and of their going slower and slower the longer they last; with a multitude of others, which it were inconvenient and tedious here to enumerate in detail.

As their views were more express ly and directly than those of their present successors in the Royal Society to the improvement of the arts, they quickly formed accurate histories of many of the most useful of these. Among their papers, within the first seven years after the Society's institution, were to be found, an history of English minés and ores, two separate histories of tinneries and tin working, histories of iron making, of lignum fossile, of saffron, of alkermes, of verdigrease, of the bleaching of wax, of colours, of the making of alum, of the preparation of salt from salt water, of enamelling, of engraving, of varnishing, of dyeing, of refining gold, of making potashes, &c. The processes of making bread, of making cloth, of tanning, with the other parts of the manufacture of leather, of paper making, of hat making, of brewing, were accurately related according to the best practice of them at that time, in different memoirs by the first members and cor

respondents of the Society. Prince Rupert communicated two papers of extraordinary value, explaining the process for the manufacture of gunpowder, and an improvement of that process, by which gunpowder might be made, which should have twenty times the strength of that which was commonly in use. Mr. Henshaw produced to the Society an ingenious history of the discovery and the manufacture of salt-petre. Many papers illustrative of the history of the useful arts were communicated by Sir William Petty, one of the most truly honourable, founders to whom any family among our British nobility can trace the origin of its wealth and nobilitating distinctions.

But none of all those original members did more than Dr. (afterwards Sir) Christopher Wren to advance the purposes of the Institution. He proposed certain curious theories of motions, extending and correcting the doctrine of Des Cartes, which, however they may have been since exploded, were imagined with great ingenuity, and illustrated by a multitude of happy experiments. He contrived to annex to a weathercock an apparatus, which, of itself, registered for every twelve hours the charges of the wind; and invented also, a thermometer, to register for itself the variations in the temperature to which it should be exposed. He was the inventor of an instrument for measuring the quantity of the rain that falls. He was the first who explained, that from the pendulum might be produced a natural standard of measure for vulgar use. first exactly measured and delineated the spheres of the humours in the eye; and thence explained how reflection conduces as much as refraction to vision. He was the first

He

author of the noble anatomical experiment of injecting liquors into the veins of animals. He made a variety of experiments to ascertain the powers of the magnet ; and many to explain the nature of the powers, by which sailing is performed, and to fix what fabrick of a ship might be most suitable to the uses, for which it is intended. He made many improvements upon telescopes, and a prodigious number of astronomical observations, particularly on the planet Saturn, and on the moon.

He invented a curious and very speedy method of etching. He suggested a number of contrivances for the improvement of water works. He found out certain perpetual lamps and registers of furnaces, by which artificial heat might be so kept up and graduated, as to imitate nature in the hatching of chickens and insects, the vegetation of plants, the production of certain fossils, and the preservation of an equality in the motions of watches, in order to the discovery of the longitude, &c. All these things he accomplished in a diligent pursuit of the objects of the Society and, as his discoveries were made, he communicated them, but with the greatest diffidence and modesty at its meetings.

And yet, even this variety, activity, and success in its researches, could not satisfy the tyrannical impatience of publick expectation. The cavillers against the society derided its members as idle dreamers, or interested impostors, who excited hopes which they could not gratify, and wasted their own lives and fortunes in pursuits having no rational attainable end. Others conceived prejudices still stronger against these studies; accusing them as atheistical, and adverse to the study of purely moral and intellectual truth; because they traced to second causes phe

nomena, which had been usually referred to the immediate agency of the Divine Power; and withdrew attention from the logick, ethicks, and theology, which had hitherto reigned in the schools. By others they were abhorred as incapable of alliance with elegance and grace, with the charms of poetry and eloquence, with the refinement of the language, or the improvement of the popular parts of literary composition. To many, that tolerance was extremely odious with which they received all men of ingenious inquiry into their correspondence, without distinction of nation or religion; and the admirers of the ages of classical antiquity derided, with the proudest contempt, the very idea upon which the institution was founded, that it was possible to extend the empire of human knowledge beyond those limits,within which the ancients had left it confined.

The society, not unmoved by such censures and complaints, yet not diverted by them from the prosecution of its views, advanced, though slowly, yet with steady and vigorous diligence, in its experiments and inquiries. Dr. Spratt's apologetical history contributed to silence many prejudices. The imitation of the design of this Society, by so many similar institutions arising after it in foreign countries, evinced the general conviction of mankind to be in its favour. Its memoirs and transactions were, from time to time, printed; and, among discoveries and inquiries which could interest none but philosophers, failed not to contain, likewise, others of general utility and importance so striking and palpable, that even the attention and approbation of the vulgar could not be refused.

In pure mathematicks, the successive publications of the Society,

to the end of the seventeenth century, exhibited a variety of inventions exalting the power of that science, and furnishing it with new arms to triumph over difficulties of investigation to which it was before unequal. The discoveries of Newton had been prompted by that spirit of mathematical and physical research, which the institution of the Society excited. Their communication did honour to the meetings of the philosophers, and enriched their volumes. Wallis, Gregory, De Moivre, and Halley, soon communicated a number of valuable problems, theorems, and new demonstrations, important both in the new display of beautiful, and in their susceptibility of application to the improvement of the mathematical arts. In mixed mathematicks the optical discoveries of Newton, Hevelius, and Huygens were, in great part, made first known to the world through the medium of the Royal Society. Leeuwenhoek and the illustrious 'Dr. Robert Hooke published most of their microscopical discoveries, in the first instance, through the same channel. A multitude of the most important observations in astronomy, the communications chiefly of Flamsteed, Hevelius, Cassini, Halley, Gregory, Bullialdus, Auzout, fill the early volumes of these Transactions. Bernoulli, Huygens, Hooke, and Wallis communicated some highly curious papers in mechanicks and accousticks. Mr. Boyle, M. Homberg, Dr. Papin, Dr. Reselius, and an inferior philosophical society at Oxford, communicated various experiments on the gravities of different fluids, their superficial figures, and their laws of movement. Thomas Savery, in the year 1699, made known to them an engine of his invention for raising water by

Mr.

Flamsteed, Borelli, Halley, Mercator, Cassini, Bullialdus, and Greaves, gave, for the improvement of geography and navigation, many observations of the longitudes and latitudes of different places, of the variations of the compass, &c. &c.

In architecture and ship building, their transactions exhibit the valuable papers of Leeuwenhoek "on the differences in timber as it grows in different countries, and is felled in different seasons ;" of Mr. Bulteel "on the sheathing of ships with lead;" of Dr. Lister, Dr. T. Robinson, and Dr. Wallis, "on bridges, arches, and chimneys, &c." Wallis and Salvetti communicated some interesting papers on the theory of musick. Dr. Sherard gave a receipt for making china varnishes.

In physiology, meteorology and pneumaticks, the researches of this Society in the last thirty years of the seventeenth century were no less diligent and meritorious. The barometer, the hygrometer, the thermometer, were first put to important use in philosophical observation by its members. The general phænomena of the weather in different seasons and latitudes were by them first recorded with philosophical accuracy. Of the winds, rains, snow, hail, lightning, thunder, meteors, exhalations, their papers exhibit an assemblage of facts, to which much has indeed been since added, but which still form a large and important part of our present science of atmospherical phænomena. They collected a prodigious variety of observations to illustrate the physical history of water, as it existed in seas, lakes, springs, mineral and saltsprings, &c.; and to explain the manufacture of salt from sea water or from that of salt springs.

In those early volumes are a great number of papers in mineralogy: