tion, except that they grow daily more
importunate and clamorous, and raise their voices in time from
mournful murmurs to raging vociferations. This eternal monotony is
always detestable to a man whose chief pleasure is to enlarge his
knowledge, and vary his ideas. Others talk of freedom from noise, and
abstraction from common business or amusements; and some, yet more
visionary, tell us that the faculties are enlarged by open prospects,
and that the fancy is more at liberty when the eye ranges without
confinement.

These conveniences may perhaps all be found in a well-chosen garret;
but surely they can not be supposed sufficiently important to have
operated invariably upon different climates, distant ages, and
separate nations. Of a universal practise, there must still be
presumed a universal cause, which, however recondite and abstruse, may
be perhaps reserved to make me illustrious by its discovery, and you
by its promulgation.

It is universally known that the faculties of the mind are invigorated
or weakened by the state of the body, and that the body is in a great
measure regulated by the various compressions of the ambient element.
The effects of the air in the production or cure of corporeal
maladies have been acknowledged from the time of Hippocrates; but no
man has yet sufficiently considered how far it may influence the
operations of the genius, tho every day affords instances of local
understanding, of wits and reasoners, whose faculties are adapted to
some single spot, and who, when they are removed to any other place,
sink at once into silence and stupidity. I have discovered by a long
series of observations that invention and elocution suffer great
impediments from dense and impure vapors, and that the tenuity of a
defecated air at a proper distance from the surface of the earth
accelerates the fancy and sets at liberty those intellectual powers
which were before shackled by too strong attraction, and unable to
expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. I have
found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, tho
not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in
appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the
flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness and
extension.

For this reason I never think myself qualified to judge decisively of
any man's faculties, whom I have only known in one degree of
elevation;