Where the coy nymph knives, combs, and scissars spies,
    And looks on thimbles with desiring eyes.

The Specola, so they call their museum here, of natural and artificial rarities, is very fine indeed; the inscription too denoting its universality, is sublimely generous:  I thought of our Bath hospital in England; more usefully, if not more magnificently so; but durst not tell the professor, who shewed the place.  At our going in he was apparently much out of humour, and unwilling to talk, but grew gradually kinder, and more communicative; and I had at last a thousand thanks to pay for an attention that rendered the sight of all more valuable.  Nothing can surpass the neatness and precision with which this elegant repository is kept, and the curiosities contained in it have specimens very uncommon.  The native gold shewed here is supposed to be the largest and most perfect lump in Europe; wonderfully beautiful it certainly is, and the coral here is such as can be seen nowhere else; they shewed me some which looked like an actual tree.

It might reasonably lower the spirits of philosophy, and tend to restraining the genius of remote enquiry, did we reflect that the very first substance given into our hand as an amusement, or subject of speculation, as soon as we arrive in this great world of wonders, never gets fully understood by those who study hardest, or live longest in it.

Coral is a substance, concerning which the natural historians have had many disputes, and settled nothing yet; knowing, as it should seem, but little more of its original, than they did when they sucked it first.  Of gold we have found perhaps but too many uses; but when the professor told us here at Bologna, that silver in the mine was commonly found mixed with arsenick, a corroding poison, or lead, a narcotic one; who could help being led forward to a train of thought on the nature and use and abuse of money and minerals in general. Suivez (as Rousseau says), la chaine de tout cela[Footnote:  Follow this clue, and see where it will lead you to.].

The astronomical apparatus at this place is a splendid one; but the models of architecture, fortifications, &c. are only more numerous; not so exact or elegant I think as those the King of England has for his own private use at the Queen’s house in St. James’s Park.  The specimens of a human figure in wax are the work of a woman, whose picture is accordingly set up in the school:  they are reckoned incomparable of their kind, and bring to one’s fancy Milton’s fine description of our first parents: 

    Two of far nobler kind—­erect and tall.