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ject he is reading, is inimitable. His hair is full and bushy, waving gently and gracefully to his shoulders; his habit and neck band are open before, with tassels hanging down, and his cloak is thrown off behind him, part of it lying on the window frame, and part on a table, on which lie his sword and belt. His cane stands on the table, leaning against the wall, and over it hangs his hat, with a short sword near the top of the cane. Above the table is an historical pic ture, with a curtain drawn before part of it. In the left corner, in front, stands a chair with a cushion and three books on it, the uppermost of which is open. On the right side of the window, a curtain is drawn back in a festoon. Beneath the window, the floor is raised a step, and the wall is covered with matting, which Gersaint mistakes for stone-work. In a narrow margin of an eighth of an inch, is written to the right, Rembrandt f. 1647, and on the left Jan Six E, and a little farther on, 29. This print is extremely rare.

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In the first impression, which is a very great rarity, the name and age of the Burgomaster are wanting, and the two middle figures in the date are reversed.

As Six was the particular friend of Rembrandt, it is not surprising that he exerted all his abilities in finishing this plate, which was the property of the Burgomaster himself, but whether as a purchase or a present is uncertain.

'M. Gersaint relates, that in one of his journeys to Holland, he happened to be at Amsterdam when Six's cabinet was selling. It consisted of a large collection of prints, and some paintings by the best masters. He purchased several prints, and among others, three or four portraits of the owner, for as there were twenty-five of them, they sold for no more than from 15 to 18 florins each. In 1750, it was purchased in Holland for an English amateur, for 150 florins. At Mr. Batt's sale, in 1756, it was sold for 341. 13s. The esti mation in which a first impression is held at present, has already been

mentioned.

When Beringhen made his collection, he could not procure this print, though he would have spared no expence to have obtained it; he therefore consoled himself with procuring a copy of it to be made with a pen, and afterwards washed with Indian ink. This copy passed with the rest of Beringhen's collection into the King of France's. cabinet, and is so well executed, as to have deceived several ama

teurs..

We have dwelled the longer on this work, because we deem the subject curious, and the manner in which the author has considered it highly creditable to his knowlege and

his taste.

A very fine head of Rembrandt, from a painting by himself, and engraven by Chapman, forms a frontispiece to this volume.

ART.

ART. VII. Essays on Philosophical Subjects. By the late Adam Smith, LL. D. &c. &c.

T

[Article concluded.]

HE tract next in order to that which we noticed at the conclusion of our last article on this work, and relating to a similar subject, is a short fragment on

THE HISTORY OF ANTIENT PHYSICS.

From contemplating the luminaries that roll in the cœlestial spaces, curiosity descends to survey those more domestic objects that are displayed in the scenery of the globe which we inhabit; and if, on this lower theatre, it finds less beauty and grandeur, it witnesses yet more diversity, and more intricacy and apparent irregularity. The various productions of the earth, the waters, and the air; minerals, plants, and animals; all the fleeting meteors of the sky,-winds, clouds, rain, hail, snow, lightning, and thunder:amid such a chaos, the ima gination stands bewildered and perplexed. This painful sen sation impels it to seek some arrangement, some chains of communication which may diminish the seeming confusion; and, as the inflections of voice are all reducible to a few elementary sounds, it was reasonable to suppose that the appearances of this living scene, however variegated, are only derived from the composition of certain simple principles. No bodies had a better claim to that distinction, by their conspicuous and extensive influence, than earth, water, air, and fire; which were therefore reckoned the Four Elements. To these were assigned the more obvious qualities of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, in a binary partition: earth was held to be cold and dry, water cold and moist, air hot and moist, and fire hot and dry. Gravity and levity were likewise reckoned important attributes, the two sources of motion, which directed all sublunary things to their proper place.' Earth and water were endued, though in different degrees, with an appetency towards the centre of the universe; while air and fire, on the contrary, were, by their nature, disposed to recede from it. By these rectilineal tendencies, had not the action of foreign impulse interposed, the elements would have acquired and maintained a state of eternal repose: earth had filled the central space, and above this water had spred itself; air had occupied the middle region; and fire had thence extended to the orbit of the moon, or perhaps diffused itself through the whole æthereal expanse. It was the circumvolution of the heavens that prevented the quiescence and torpor of those concentric spheres; it was this fervid rotation that infused a germ of activity, and that, in causing the vicissitudes of sea

sons,

sons, and of day and night, forced a portion of the fire, perhaps, to descend into the air, into the water, into the earth, and thus mixed the several elements together, attempered, and transmuted them; producing, from such combinations and modifications, all that variety of objects below which attracts our regard.

It cannot be denied that this system of quaternion, rude as it certainly was, served, with tolerable plausibility, to connect in imagination a multitude of apparently incongruous objects. In the beginnings of science, it was certainly a singular effort of invention; it possesses beauties at first sight unperceived; and the hypothesis, with all its imperfections, cannot be judged contemptible, if tried by the chaste reason and copious lights that happily distinguish our own times. Candour must allow it due praise: but the propensity to magnify the merits of past ages, in pleading excuse for the notion of levity, has betrayed our author into an expression, which, though frequent in the mouths of philologers and modern Platonists, is unworthy, we think, of the philosophic Smith. He says, it was 'no superior sagacity, but chance alone,' that taught us the weight of the air. Not to cavil about the very loose import of the word chance, is not the whole of our knowlege of Nature necessarily derived, à posteriori, from the observation of facts? It signifies little in whatever manner those facts are obtained; whether they are elicited by artificial combinations denomi nated experiments, or occasionally present themselves in the concerns of ordinary life. In drawing from them the proper conclusions, still consists the true display of sagacity. Few of our readers need to be informed that the fine discovery of atmospheric pressure was produced in consequence of the failure of some workmen in Italy, in attempting to construct a pump to raise water when the height happened to exceed 33 feet. It is hardly credible that similar facts have not occurred since the time of Ctsebius, the inventor of that useful machine. During the dark ages, such facts might pass unheeded. Even near the middle of the last century, that memorable incident was yet insufficient to shake the belief of the Peripatetics in their occult qualities, a doctrine more prolific in words than ideas; who did not reject their favourite maxim that "Nature abhors a vacuum," but contented themselves with restricting it by supposing that, notwithstanding this general repugnance, Nature will, beyond a certain limit of elevation, reluctantly permit an imperfect vacuity. This wretched explication, with its unmeaning verbiage, the showy veil of ignorance, was viewed in its just colours by the penetrating mind of Galileo; who, perceiving the important result, but then afflicted with age and REV. JUNE, 1797. blindness,

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blindness, charged his disciple Toricelli to prosecute the sub ject. This ingenious follower, desirous of excluding adventitious circumstances, and of simplifying as much as possible the observation, filled a tube with mercury, and made the capital experiment which bears his name. Still was that discovery unable to convince many of the adherents of scholastic so phistry. Various were the puerile objections, and the subterSuges, to which they had recourse. Nor did the learned world generally admit the air to be a ponderous substance till after the decisive experiment of Pascal; who found that the counterpoising column of mercury was considerably shorter on the top than at the bottom of the Puy de Dome, a mountain in Auvergne.

The history now recited affords a memorable example of the obstinacy of prejudice, and of the force of that fatal propensity to transfer our own character, our animation, and our feeling, to the objects around us; a propensity which is the prolific source of most of the errors and absurdities that have disfigured, and still tarnish, physical theories.

From considering the cosmology of the antient sects, Dr. Smith is led in course to estimate their theological opinions. The idea of vegetation, growth, or birth, is most familiar to our thoughts. It was very natural, therefore, to believe that the present order of things sprang at first spontaneously out of chaos. The deities were of later origin, and directed the various distinct operations. As man's experience enlarged, the world came to be regarded as one whole, which, from the analogy of a machine, implied the presidence of a master operator, and the agency of an universal mind. According to Timæus, who was followed by Plato, that intelligent Being who formed the world endowed it with a principle of ife and understanding, which extends from its centre to its remotest circumference, which is conscious of all its changes, and which governs and directs all its motions to the great end of its formation.' This Soul of the world was held to be itself the greatest of created gods, of indissoluble essence, and inseparable from the mass into which it was infused. The coelestial spheres were supposed, each of them, to be animated by an immortal intelligence; from which inferior deities, all the sublunary Beings derived their existence.

Aristotle, after Öcellus, believed the world to be eternal, the necessary effect of an eternal cause. The first heavens, the spring of all the other motions, according to him, were revolved by a supreme, unchangeable, unextended Being, whose essence consisted in intelligence; and thence the planetary spheres received their particular revolutions, each under the guidance

of

of a Being of the same kind :—but the influence of these inferior deities was confined to their proper office; and every thing below, exhibiting a perpetual conflict of order and misrule, was abandoned to the direction of Nature, Chance, and Necessity.

The Stoics seem to have refined on the doctrine of Plato. The universe itself they conceived to be a divinity, an animal, whose body was the solid extended mass, and whose soul was that æthereal fire which penetrated and actuated the whole. From this unbounded Ether, the essence of consummate reason, all those portions of life and sensation, dispensed through nature to the infinitude of forms, were supposed to emanate.

In the system of the Stoics, the intelligence which originally formed, and that which animated the world, were one and the same; all inferior intelligences were detached portions of the great one; and therefore, in a longer, or in a shorter time, were all of them, even the gods themselves, who animated the celestial bodies, to be at last resolved into the infinite essence of this almighty Jupiter, who at a destined period, should, by an universal conflagration, wrap up all things, in that ætherial and fiery nature, out of which they had originally been deduced, again to bring forth a new Heaven and a new Earth, new animals, new men, new deities; all of which would again, at a fated time, be swallowed up in a like conflagration, again to be re-produced, and again to be re-destroyed, and so on without

end.'

Notwithstanding the extravagance which tinctures this system, it contains the most sublime conceptions, and the most important and recondite truths. We are strongly tempted to refer its origin to India; where, at a very remote period, the sciences were profoundly cultivated, and with the most extraordinary success.

The next fragment, inscribed

THE HISTORY OF THE ANTIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS, is much related to the preceding; for the metaphysical doctrines of the antient sects were chiefly derived from the prevailing systems of physics. In all the changes and transformations that bodies undergo, something appears to remain the same, and something to coalesce which is different: the first was the stuff or subject-matter; the second was the species, the specific essence, the essential or substantial form of the body. The former was universal and inert; it became sensible and quali fied only by its union with some species. On these specific essences the mutual effects of bodies were believed to depend, and consequently the successive revolutions in the material world. They did not, however, consist in the features that discriminate individual objects, which are exposed to perpetual fluctuation.

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