dear Editor, you are fishing for a compliment from old Timothy again!-I have seen nothing at all comparable to it during the last threescore and ten years. Thank you, en passant, for the Numbers of it you have sent me. Almost any thing does for our minister to read; and I have sent them over regularly to the manse. There is not another copy in the whole countryside; and he quotes great blads of it, I understand, at the presbytery dinner, when it all passes for havers of his own, honest man. Mrs Tickler, however, cannot endure it, and says she is at a loss to comprehend how any thing so stupid should make her so angry. She asserts that the good old Tory Scots Magazine has become a drunken Whig; and, what is still worse, that the Editors are infidels, and sneer, in an under-hand way, at Christianity, like the godless wits of the Edinburgh Review. For myself I can see nothing of this, nor any thing else, in the New Series, which seems to be a sort of republication of the old women's stories (of which there are not a few) in the old Scots Magazine. It amazes me, that Mr Constable should have preferred Cleghorn and Pringle to Hugh Murray, his former Editor. Hugh is a man of real talents-even genius; and though he committed little odd innocent blunders now and then, they were harmless in comparison with the general dulness and stupidity of the present Editors, which really are excessive, and, I fear, hopeless. I am much amused with what you tell me about their quarrel with the Ettrick Shepherd. So they will no longer allow that most ingenious poet to be praised in their work, and merely because an old man like me cracked a few jokes upon it! Will they allow nobody to be laughed at in your Magazine but themselves? By the way, I observe lately that the famous biographer of Mr Hogg still lends the sanction of his great name to their Magazine, and that he has been trying to play the satirist there. Well, just whisper into his ear, that if, instead of using the rod in the place where it ought to be used, he keeps any longer flourishing it about in the "New Series," it shall be wrested out of his hands, and pretty smartly applied to his own extremities.

This gentleman has absolutely become an unprincipled and indiscri

minate satirist; and the New Editors follow his example "haud passibus equis." For some time they kept pretty quiet, and allowed your wicked wags to have it all their own way. But unless you look about you, they will laugh down Blackwood's Magazine. Allow me for one paragraph to employ two or three similes. -Messrs Cleghorn and Pringle remind me of two snails that come crawling out in the calm of the evening, each clad in a complete coat of mail, and protruding a formidable pair of horns. I have seen such snails look quite chivalrous and heroic; but the instant a straw touches the said horns, in they go-and every thing wears a pacific character. Still, however, the cornuous substances keep peeping out-out-as it would almost seem, in spite of the creatures themselves-till some unhandy accident cuts them off smack-smooth. And so, I venture to prophesy, will it be with these Editors, if they do not take in, and keep in their horns.-Messrs Cleghorn and Pringle remind me of a couple of what, in Scotland, are called bum-bees (the humble bee in England) who come bumming round and round one as if they were excessively wroth, and proposed to sting,-when, all at once, off they drive, as if some new crotchet got into their heads, and leave one wondering at what the creatures could possibly mean by such insolence.- -Messrs Cleghorn and Pringle remind me of two "shard-born beetles," who, "when all the air a solemn stillness holds," come swinging along "with drowsy hum,” till, as it were, intentionally knocking themselves against the breast of some meditative gentleman at eventide, they fall down at his feet, crushed, and bleeding to death, in the dry summer-dust.

-Finally, Messrs Cleghorn and Pringle remind me (each of them does so) of that simple and foolish bird, the cuckoo, who takes his station among the new series of branches of an old oak-stump, and there keeps bobbing up his tail, and bobbing down his head, all the while repeating the self-same cry, and attended by his little troop of titlings, from whom he receives a small sustenance of worms and insects, till he is suddenly brought down from his elevation by some sporting shepherd, with an old-fashioned fowling-piece charged with No VII.

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I therefore, Mr Editor, intend to give these gentlemen two months to consider of it, and if at the end of that time, I have once discovered them with their horns out like snails-bumming round you like humble bees-humming onwards like beetles-or bobbing their tails like gowks"-then will I celebrate them in immortal verse ;-yea, "I will write a sweet song against them, and put it into thy book," that is to say, if you will allow me; for Mrs Tickler reminds me of your having mentioned the last time you were here with your wife, that you thought them and their Magazine quite unworthy of any farther notice. For me, I don't care a fig-if the worst come to the worst, I'll speak to my good friend Mr Miller, and tip the creatures an eighteenpenny pamphlet on my own bottom.

I find, my dear Editor, that I have scarcely said one word of what I intended to say,and filled my sheet entirely with extraneous matter. I shall have an opportunity of writing you again soon, by a private hand,when I hope to amuse you with certain old-fashioned whimsies of mine about the Whigs of Scotland, whom I see you like no more than myself.Meanwhile, Adieu! yours affectionately, TIMOTHY TICKLER.

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY OF EXTENSIVE VEINS AND ROCKS OF CHROMATE OF IRON IN THE SHETLAND ISLANDS.

DR HIBBERT, the gentleman who last year commenced a mineralogical survey of the Shetland isles, has this season resumed his investigations, and, we understand, has now nearly finished his description of all the islands of that remote portion of the British empire. His labours have been entirely directed to the determination of the arrangement and nature of the various rocks and metalliferous minerals, without allowing his examinations to be warped by the airy poetical visions of the Neptunists, or disfigured and distorted by the monstrous and absurd fancies of the Plutonists. He finds the prevailing rocks are gneiss and mica slate, with subordinate granite, limestone, hornblende rock, and serpentine. These are skirted with what Professor Jameson calls the great floetz VOL. III.

sandstone formation, but the great floetz limestone formations are entirely awanting. Last season, Dr Hibbert observed, in serpentine veins, that valuable mineral the chromate of iron, but want of time prevented him pursuing this discovery. We understand he has now ascertained that it occurs in great quantities, forming, in some places, veins several yards wide, and in others is so abundant, that the walls of enclosures are built of it. From this ore several beautiful and very durable pigments are obtained, which are highly valued in the arts. Hitherto the market has been supplied with it from North America, but now that it has been ascertained to occur in profusion, and of excellent quality, in Shetland, it will become an article of trade from that country.

NOTICE OF THE OPERATIONS UNDERTAKEN TO DETERMINE THE FIGURE OF THE EARTH, BY M. BIOT, OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. Paris 1818.

[Having been so fortunate as to obtain one of the few copies of this interesting little work which have reached England, we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of making a translation of it, for the benefit of our readers who, however well acquainted with the name and general merits of M. Biot, may not have received any exact information respecting the circumstances which occasioned and attended the late visit of that Eminent Stranger to these more remote districts of our island. ourselves with the hope of seeing our pages We can scarcely flatter frequently adorned with articles so universally interesting as this must be. The man of science will prize it for the luminous account which it contains of some important physical investigations,-they, who are not qualified to appreciate this part of its merits, will listen with delight to the personal adventures of one who is not merely a sçavant, but a philosopher in the higher and better sense of the word-a liberal, enlightened, and good man. To those who were so happy as to have the opportunity of offering any assistance to M. Biot in the course of his tour, more especially to those gentlemen whose kindness rendered a two-months' residence in Shetland agreeable to a polite stranger accustomed to all the luxuries of Parisian climate and society, the affectionate manner in which their services are here commemorated must afford a pleasure greater in proportion to its peculiarity. There can be no occasion to apologise for the

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length of this article; we were well aware that the interest of the "Notice" would be almost entirely destroyed by mutilating or dividing it.]

WHEN on one of the towers of Florence, Galileo, two centuries ago, explained to a very few persons, in conferences almost mysterious, his new discoveries with regard to the laws of gravity, the motion of the earth, and the figure of the planets,-could he ever have foreseen that these truths, then rejected and persecuted, should, after so short an interval of time, come to be considered as matters of so great importance, and contemplated with so general an admiration, that the Governments of Europe should cause extensive operations, and distant journies, to be undertaken for the sole purpose of extending them, and of ascertaining all their particulars? and that in consequence of an unhoped for propagation of all manner of knowledge, the results of their labours should be offered to the public interest in numerous assemblies composed of the most brilliant classes of society? Such, notwithstanding, is the immense change which has taken place in the fate of the sciences since that epoch! When Galileo and Bacon appeared, after the many sublime spirits which antiquity had produced, they found the career of the sciences still untrodden, for the name of science could not be given to the useless heap of hypothetical speculations, in which, before their day, natural philosophy consisted. Till then, men seem to have been more inclined to conjecture than to study nature; the art of interrogating her, and of making her reveal her mysteries, was unknown; they discovered it. They shewed that the human mind is too feeble and unsteady to advance alone into this labyrinth of truths; that it requires to pause at phenomena which are connected with each other, as the infant leans upon the supports which it meets with when it first tries to walk; and that in the numerous circumstances, in which nature seems to allow it to embrace too great intervals, it is necessary that, by experiments artfully conceived, new phenomena should be made to spring up in the path, to ensure its footing, and to prevent it from wandering. Such has been the fruitfulness of this method, that in less than two centuries, discoveries

without number, discoveries certain and lasting, have burst forth in all the departments of the sciences,— have communicated themselves with rapidity to the arts and to industry, which they have enriched with wonderful applications,—and have increased the sum of human knowledge a thousand times beyond what had been done by all antiquity. But thus extended, the sciences exceed the powers of any individual. Their prodigious circle cannot be embraced but by a great literary body, which unites in its collective capacity, as in a vast sensorium, every conception, every view, and every thought; which knowing neither human infirmities, nor the decay of the senses and of old age, ever young and ever active, scrutinizes incessantly the hidden properties of nature, discovers the powers concealed in them, and at last offers them to society perfected and prepared for application. In this centre, where all opinions are agitated and combated, no authority can prevail but that of reason and nature. Here even the voice of a Plato could no longer attract listeners to the brilliant dreams of his imagination; and the genius of a Descartes, obliged to continue faithful to the method of observation and of doubt which he himself had created, could only produce truths unmixed with error. But Plato and Descartes; with all their glory, would now be considered but as transient elements of this great organ of the sciences. Its strength would survive their genius, and would pursue into futurity the developement of their thoughts. Such is now the noble destination of learned societies. The unity and the duration, which their institution gives to human efforts, complete the power of the experimental method. They alone can henceforth ensure the continuity of the progress of human knowledge,

they alone can develope great theories, and obtain results which, by their intrinsic difficulty, and by the diversity, the perseverance, and the extent of the labours they demand, could never be within the reach of individuals. The determination of the size and figure of the earth,—the measurement of gravity at its surface,the connexion of this phenomenon with the interior construction of the globe, with the disposition of the strata, and the laws of their densities,

are of the number of those long enduring questions which learned societies alone could propose to encounter and to resolve. They have for a century and a half formed one of the objects of the unceasing labours of the Academy of Sciences. The first exact measurement of a degree of the terrestrial meridian was made in France, by Picard, in the year 1670. Newton availed himself of it, in order to establish the law of universal gravity, from which the employment of an inaccurate measurement of the earth had at first caused him to wander. Two years afterwards, Richer, who was sent by the Academy to Cayenne to make astronomical researches, discovered that his clock, which at Paris beat the seconds, went gradually more slowly as he approached the equator; and that it again went quicker, by the same degrees, in returning towards the North, so as to resume exactly its original motion, at the point of his departure. Again,―according to the discoveries of Huyggens, the quickness of the oscillations of a pendulum augments or didiminishes with the intensity of the gravity which causes its motion. The observation of Richer then proved that this intensity was different in different latitudes, and that it increased in going from the equator to the pole. Newton, in his immortal work on the principles of Natural Philosophy, connected all these results with the law of attraction. He shewed, that the variation observed in gravity disclosed a flattening of the earth at the pole, a circumstance which is observable also in the form of Jupiter, Saturn, and the other planets which turn upon an axis. He conceived that this flattened form was a consequence of the even attraction of the portions of every planet, combined by the centrifugal force of its rotatory motion. But in order that the arrangement determined by these two kinds of forces should thus have been able to make itself effectual, it behoved these great bodies to have been originally fluid: he took them then as in that state, and showed how to calculate the flattening of a planet according to the intensity of the gravity at its surface, and the quickness of its rotation, supposing its mass to be homogeneous. This theory, applied to the earth, gave a variation of gravity,

but little different from that observed by Richer, though somewhat slighter, indicating that the earth is composed of strata, of which the density goes on increasing from the surface to the centre, as Clairault has since demonstrated.

The calculations of Newton were, for some time, the only inductions which existed for believing the earth to be flattened at the poles. The arch of the meridian, measured by Picard, was quite sufficient to give the length of the semi-diameter of the earth at the place where it was observed; but that arch was much too small even for shewing imperfectly the effect of the flattening. More accurate knowledge was expected to be procured from the measurement of the complete arch which traverses France from Perpignan to Dunkirk; a measurement which was intended to serve, if I may so express it, as the axis of a general map of France, with the execution of which Colbert had entrusted the Academy. But in the imperfect state of the instruments and astronomical methods of that period, this arch itself was too short to make the influence of the flattening distinctly perceptible; and the small variations, which thence result in the lengths of the consecutive degrees, might very easily be lost in the errors of the observations. This indeed happened. The differences which the degrees presented, were found from the effects of these errors, in such a direction as would have led to the result of elongation at the poles, in place of flattening. The Academy was not disheartened; it perceived that the question could not be clearly decided without measuring two arches of the meridian, in regions of the earth where the flattening must produce more sensible differences between the degrees, that is to say, near the equator and the pole. She found among her members men sufficiently devoted to undertake these laborious journies. In the year 1735, Bouguer, Godin, and La Condamine, went to America, where they joined the Spanish Commissioners. Some months after, Clairault, Maupertuis, and Le Monnier, departed for the north. The results of these expeditions put the flattening of the earth beyond doubt, but its absolute amount still remained uncertain. The degree of Peru, compared with that of

France, gave a slighter flattening than if the earth were homogeneous; the operation of Lapland indicated a greater. In this uncertainty, the lengths of the pendulum, which they were careful to measure, agreed with the flattening deduced from the operation at the equator; but the exactness of these measurements, especially in the operation of Lapland, was not such as could enable them to solve the difficulty. No fault lay with any one, as at that period it was impossible to do it better.

Things remained at this point during fifty years. Bouguer, La Condamine, Clairault, and Maupertuis, died; but after that interval, astronomical instruments becoming much more perfect, and the methods of observation more general and more precise, hopes were entertained of removing the uncertainty which preceding operations had left on the flattening of the earth. The Academy, the heir of these great works, resolved to resume them with all the means which could ensure their success. She gave still more importance to them, by proposing to take the very size of the earth, thus determined, for the fundamental element of a system of general and uniform measures, of which all the parts would be connected together by simple relations, and in accordance with our mode of numeration. At this day, as formerly, she hopes that such a system, founded upon natural elements, invariable and independent of the individual prejudices of the people, will ultimately become as common to all, as are now the Arabian ciphers, the division of time, and the calender. It was a wish long ago expressed by the best and most enlightened of our kings. The proposal realizing it, was, so to speak, the last sigh of the Academy; and the act which decided its execution, was one of the last which preceded the fatal epoch of our great political convulsions. All the institutions tending to maintain civilization and knowledge perished, and the Academy perished with them. But true men of science do not require to have repeated to them the authority for doing that which they believe useful. In the midst of the disorder and madness excited by popular anarchy, MM. de Lambre and Méchain, furnished with new instruments which Borda had invented for them, began,

and continued, often at the risk of their lives, the most extended and exact measurement of the earth which had ever been undertaken. They concluded it as well, although not so easily, as they could have done in the bosom of the most profound peace. The measurement of the pendulum was not forgotten. Borda, who had done so much to perfect all the other parts of the observations, invented for this experiment a method, the exactness of which surpassed every thing which had been till then imagined, and which has never been surpassed.

After these operations were terminated, it was thought that the arch of the meridian might be continued a good many degrees south, across Catalonia, and that it might even be possible to prolong it to the Balearic isles, by means of an immense triangle of which the sides extending over the sea, should join these isles to the coast of Valentia. Méchain devoted himself to this operation. I say that he devoted himself, for he died of fever in a small town in the kingdom of Valentia, after having surveyed all the chain, and measured the first triangles. M. Arago and I were charged with the completion of the work, jointly with the Commissioners of the King of Spain, Charles IV.

We had the good fortune to succeed; but it is in remembrance, that M. Arago did not return to France without encountering great danger, and after a distressing captivity. Our results, by confirming those of the arc of France, gave them a new proof of accuracy. We measured also, at our most remote station, the length of the seconds pendulum, after the method of Borda. M. Matthieu and I repeated the same operation upon different points of the arc comprised between Perpignan and Dunkirk. These experiments gave for the flattening of the earth, a value almost exactly equal to that which M. de Lambre had already obtained, by comparing the arc of France and Spain with the degrees of the equator, calculated with new pains, and with the degree of Lapland which Mr Swanberg, an able Swedish astronomer, had corrected by new observations; finally, with an arc of many degrees, which Major Lambton had measured with great accuracy in the English possessions of India.