The Baconian precept, to "torture Nature out of her secrets," has been, and ever must be, abortive of the good intended. Nature is performing freely and openly every hour, without making us wiser, and as little while she is operating in our own experiments. Her language, of which inertia and pressure are the alpha and omega, is not studied; nor does it mislead or flatter like our own. Experiments innumerable have been performed; the experimentum crucis resorted to; the screw applied to the utmost pinch, without either confession or concealment on Nature's part. Hence, the experimenter is left to make his own philosophy of the case, of which the next operator makes a different; and all are falsely interpreted that violate the principle of inertia, which all do. Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Black, Reid, Davy, Des Cartes, experimented indefatigably under the most favourable auspices,—exalted talent, and the institutions of the world at command; but all on false principles; yet Nature, tortured or not, left them to their own mis-interpretations. Aristotle, true in his opinion of motion, was himself ignorant of the cause of continuous motion, or all would not be so at present. Bacon recommended experiment, without teaching the natural mode of interpretation. Newton spent his valuable time, to the world's great loss, in experimenting on light, in ascertaining and describing its properties, as if there were material light; instead of which, light is a mere sensible effect; hence, a physical nonentity. Black and Reid called to their assistance all the powers of numbers, to ascertain and prove the quantity of heat in the animal system, and of cold in ice; but could not torture Nature out of the information, that heat and cold do not belong to matter or bodies, as a knowledge of the function of the senses could have informed them. Davy travelled to Skehallean to find from the size of the hill, a ratio of attraction, whence to calculate the quantity of attraction in the entire globe of the earth: at home, correctly sought, he would have found, without numerical assistance and the pendulum, that the amount is zero. The deflection of the pendulum was caused by the pressure on one side of the bulb being greater than on the side facing the hill; which, from varying hourly with the sun's altitude, should have told him that the deflection is a mere weather-deviating circumstance.

On the other hand, who perceives the natural truths elicited by even his own experiments! That truly great philosopher, Priestly, remained ignorant that his own experiments on blood and air brought to light the principle on which the blood is arterialized, without coming in contact with the air in the lungs; of which experiments the faculty are reprehensibly ignorant at present; also the principle of congelation without cold. It is a general error that men must be philosophers because they are mathematicians and first-rate experimenters, yet do not know what keeps the blood in motion, nor how water becomes ice.

What experiment was ever so absurdly illustrated as that of ice formed in the midst of fire; which is explained by, "evaporation generating cold in a red-hot crucible," and while maintaining that cold is only the absence of heat. The rationale is: the oxygen of water is the hindrance to congelation, which the evaporation carries off, and the remaining elements of the water are compressed into ice. What are the elementary constituents of water, has yet to be learned. Misled by false-directing philosophy, the analysis of a rotten potato, in quest of the cause of the vegetable epidemic, is as wise as were the same scientific procedure taken on the contents of a pustule to discover the cause of the small pox: the result in both cases must be a complete new formation; and in the former, the result could be no preventive information whatever to the planter. To convince planters and remove all timidity, every garden owner should plant an experimental patch with potato peelings, each having an eye; the crop is certain and good, and supplies the cottager with the next year's seed at no expense. The cutting for seed may be of exhausted vegetating power, while the peeling of even the same potato may be as sound as ever. The badly grown potatoes of the previous crop caused those of the following to be of imperfect growth and perishable: hence the general potato-rot.