was not then quite so common as it will be.  I shall talk of a secret for roasting a wild boar and a whole pack of hounds alive, without hurting them, so that the whole chase may be brought up to table; and for this secret, the Duke of Newcastle’s grandson, if he can ever get a son, is to give a hundred thousand pounds.  Then the delightfulness of having whole groves of humming-birds, tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spying-glasses to see all that is doing in China, with a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in one’s face for staring at, while they are offering rewards for perfecting discoveries, of the principles of which we have not the least conception!  If ever this book should come forth, I must expect to have all the learned in arms against me, who measure all knowledge backward:  some of them have discovered symptoms of all arts in Homer; and Pineda,[2] had so much faith in the accomplishments of his ancestors, that he believed Adam understood all sciences but politics.  But as these great champions for our forefathers are dead, and Boileau not alive to hitch me into a verse with Perrault, I am determined to admire the learning of posterity, especially being convinced that half our present knowledge sprung from discovering the errors of what had formerly been called so.  I don’t think I shall ever make any great discoveries myself, and therefore shall be content to propose them to my descendants, like my Lord Bacon,[3] who, as Dr. Shaw says very prettily in his preface to Boyle, “had the art of inventing arts:”  or rather like a Marquis of Worcester, of whom I have seen a little book which he calls “A Century of Inventions,"[4] where he has set down a hundred machines to do impossibilities with, and not a single direction how to make the machines themselves.

[Footnote 1:  It is worth noting that these predictions that “it will be common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old” has been verified many years since; at least, if not in the case of oaks, in that of large elms and ashtrees.  In 1850 Mr. Paxton offered to a Committee of the House of Commons to undertake to remove the large elm which was standing on the ground proposed for the Crystal Palace of the Exhibition of 1851, and his master, the Duke of Devonshire, has since that time removed many trees of very large size from one part of his grounds to another; and similarly the “making of trout rivers” has been carried out in many places, even in our most distant colonies, by Mr. Buckland’s method of raising the young fish from roe in boxes and distributing them in places where they were needed.]

[Footnote 2:  Pineda was a Spanish Jesuit of the seventeenth century, and a voluminous writer.]