The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.

No.  I. An odd volume of The Adventurer.  It has many interesting things enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne’s famous Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal’s “Christianity as old as the Creation.”  Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul.  An excellent person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange delusion.

Here is a paragraph from his Dedication: 

“He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate hand of an avenging god, his very thinking substance has, for more than seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing.  None, no, not the least remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an idea is left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or was perceived by it.”

Think of this as the Dedication of a book “universally allowed to be the best which that controversy produced,” and what a flood of light it pours on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid reveries have been so often mistaken for piety!  No.  I. had something for me, then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth offering.

No.  II. was “A View of Society and Manners in Italy.”  Vol.  III.  By John Moore, M. D. (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book.  In this particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very spirited and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour’s mighty agreeable reading.  So much for Number Two.

No.  III. was “An essay On the Great effects of Even Languid and Unheeded local motion.”  By the Hon. Robert Boyle.  Published in 1685, and, as appears from other sources, “received with great and general applause.”  I confess I was a little startled to find how near this earlier philosopher had come to the modern doctrines, such as are illustrated in Tyndall’s “Heat considered as a Mode of Motion.”  He speaks of “Us, who endeavor to resolve the Phenomena of Nature into Matter and Local motion.”  That sounds like the nineteenth century, but what shall we say to this?  “As when a bar of iron or silver, having been well hammered, is newly taken off of the anvil; though the eye can discern no motion in it, yet the touch will readily perceive it to be very hot, and if you spit upon it, the brisk agitation of the insensible parts will become visible in that which they will produce in the liquor.”  He takes a bar of tin, and tries whether by bending it to and fro two or three times he cannot “procure a considerable internal commotion among the parts “; and having by this means broken or cracked it in the middle, finds, as he expected, that the middle parts had considerably heated each other.  There are many other curious and interesting observations in the volume which I should like to tell you of, but these will serve my purpose.