entences with them are biography; a few rambling
sketches fill up the outline to their taste; and the whole forms a
specimen of that eloquence which men are content to admire on the other
side of the Channel.

At length his career drew to a close. Towards his sixty-fourth year, his
health began to decline. It had never been robust, though his habits had
been temperate; but feebleness of stomach, and an organic disease,
predicted the approach of his dissolution. He died on the 29th of
October 1783, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. Notwithstanding his
feebleness of body, his intellectual vigour remained--thus adding one to
the many proofs of the distinct natures of mind and body. In his
intervals of ease, he continued to occupy himself with mathematical
investigations. With a deplorable want of feeling, he talked with levity
of his approaching departure--an event awful to the best, and, to the
wisest, solemn in proportion to their wisdom. He died in the fulness of
that scientific reputation which he deserved, and of that literary
reputation which he did not deserve; but, by the combination of both,
ranking as the most distinguished intellectual name of Europe in his
day.

The life of a later philosopher, the unfortunate Lavoisier, gives Lord
Brougham an opportunity of rendering justice to an eminent foreigner,
and of vindicating the claims of his own still more memorable
countrymen, Black and Watt. Chemistry is especially the science of the
eighteenth century, as geometry was of the seventeenth. It is a
characteristic of that great, however slow, change, which is now
evidently in progress through Europe, that those sciences which most
promote the comforts, the powers, and the progress of the multitude,
obviously occupy the largest share of mental illustration. Of all the
sciences, chemistry is that one which contributes most largely to the
dominion of man over nature. It is the very handmaid of Wisdom,
instructing us in the properties of things, and continually developing
more and more the secrets of those vast and beneficent processes by
which the physical frame of creation is rendered productive to man. It
must thus be regarded as the most essential instrument of our physical
well-being. It takes a part in all that administers to our wants and
enjoyments. Our clothing, our medicine, our food; the cultivation of the
ground, the salubrity of the atmosphere; the very blood, bone, and
muscle of man, all depend on che