suggest to those
who cook, although they may perhaps not receive the attention which, in
my opinion, they deserve, from not coming from the pen of an adept.

In the first place, it must require much time to try different
formulae. In the next place it may happen that, in the progress of human
knowledge, more correct formula: may be discovered, and constants may
be determined with far greater precision. Or it may be found that some
physical circumstance influences the results, (although unsuspected at
the time) the measure of which circumstance may perhaps be recovered
from other contemporary registers of facts. [Imagine, by way of example,
the state of the barometer or thermometer.] Or if the selection of
observations has been made with the view of its agreeing precisely with
the latest determination, there is some little danger that the average
of the whole may differ from that of the chosen ones, owing to some law
of nature, dependent on the interval between the two sets, which
law some future philosopher may discover, and thus the very best
observations may have been thrown aside.

In all these, and in numerous other cases, it would most probably
happen that the cook would procure a temporary reputation for unrivalled
accuracy at the expense of his permanent fame. It might also have the
effect of rendering even all his crude observations of no value; for
that part of the scientific world whose opinion is of most weight, is
generally so unreasonable, as to neglect altogether the observations
of those in whom they have, on any occasion, discovered traces of the
artist. In fact, the character of an observer, as of a woman, if doubted
is destroyed.

The manner in which facts apparently lost are restored to light, even
after considerable intervals of time, is sometimes very unexpected, and
a few examples may not be without their use. The thermometers employed
by the philosophers who composed the Academia Del Cimento, have been
lost; and as they did not use the two fixed points of freezing and
boiling water, the results of a great mass of observations have remained
useless from our ignorance of the value of a degree on their instrument.
M. Libri, of Florence, proposed to regain this knowledge by comparing
their registers of the temperature of the human body and of that of some
warm springs in Tuscany, which have preserved their heat uniform during
a century, as well as of other things similarly circumstanced.

Another