argely described. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves.

This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of
several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste, was
purchased and applied to that use.

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the
academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I
could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face,
his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His
clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight
years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were
to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in
raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight
years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with
sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low,
and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity,
especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made
him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose,
because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.

I went into another chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost
overcome with a horrible stink. My conductor pressed me forward,
conjuring me in a whisper "to give no offence, which would be highly
resented;" and therefore I durst not so much as stop my nose. The
projector of this cell was the most ancient student of the academy; his
face and beard were of a pale yellow; his hands and clothes daubed over
with filth. When I was presented to him, he gave me a close embrace, a
compliment I could well have excused. His employment, from his first
coming into the academy, was an operation to reduce human excrement to
its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture
which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming
off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance, from the society, of a vessel
filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel.

I saw another at work to calcine ice into gunpowder; who likewise showed
me a treatise he had written concerning the malleability of fire, which
he intended to publish.

There was a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for
bu