subject is treated in the algebraic method, without diagrams to assist the conception.  My present occupations not permitting me to read any thing which requires a long and undisturbed attention, I am not able to give you the character of this work from my own examination.  It has been received with great approbation in Europe.  In Italy, the works of Spallanzani on Digestion and Generation are valuable.  Though, perhaps, too minute, and therefore tedious, he has developed some useful truths, and his book is well worth attention; it is in four volumes, octavo.  Clavigero, an Italian also, who has resided thirty-six years in Mexico, has given us a History of that country, which certainly merits more respect than any other work on the same subject.  He corrects many errors of Dr. Robertson; and though sound philosophy will disapprove many of his ideas, we must still consider it as an useful work, and assuredly the best we possess on the same subject.  It is in four thin volumes, small quarto.  De la Lande has not yet published a fifth volume.

The chemical dispute about the conversion and reconversion of air and water, continues still undecided.  Arguments and authorities are so balanced, that we may still safely believe, as our fathers did before us, that these principles are distinct.  A schism of another kind has taken place among the chemists.  A particular set of them here have undertaken to remodel all the terms of the science, and to give to every substance a new name, the composition, and especially the termination of which, shall define the relation in which it stands to other substances of the same family.  But the science seems too much in its infancy as yet, for this reformation; because, in fact, the reformation of this year must be reformed again the next year, and so on, changing the names of substances as often as new experiments develope properties in them undiscovered before.  The new nomenclature has, accordingly, been already proved to need numerous and important reformations.  Probably it will not prevail.  It is espoused by the minority only here, and by very few, indeed, of the foreign chemists.  It is particularly rejected in England.

In the arts, I think two of our countrymen have presented the most important inventions.  Mr. Paine, the author of ‘Common Sense,’ has invented an iron bridge, which promises to be cheaper by a great deal than stone, and to admit of a much greater arch.  He supposes it may be ventured for an arch of five hundred feet.  He has obtained a patent for it in England, and is now executing the first experiment with an arch of between ninety and one hundred feet.  Mr. Rumsey has also obtained a patent for his navigation by the force of steam in England, and is soliciting a similar one here.  His principal merit is in the improvement of the boiler, and instead of the complicated machinery of oars and paddles, proposed by others, the substitution of so simple a thing as the reaction of a stream of water on his vessel.