have followed in the same pathway when they placed before us
substances nature apparently never meant us to see.

We will follow chemistry to the very moment when it penetrated our
subterraneous laboratories to enlighten our PREPARERS, to
establish principles, to create methods and to unveil causes which
had remained occult.

In fine we will see by the combined power of time and experience
that a new science has all at once appeared, which feeds,
nourishes, restores, preserves, persuades, consoles, and not
content with strewing handsfull of flowers over the individual,
contributes much to the power and prosperity of empires.

If, amid the grave lucubrations, a piquante anecdote, or an
agreeable reminiscence of a stormy life drips from my pen, we will
let it remain to enable the attention to rest for a moment, so
that our readers, the number of whom does not alarm us, may have
time to breathe. We would like to chat with them. If they be men
we know they are indulgent as they are well informed. If women
they must be charming. [Footnote: Here the Professor, full of his
subject, suffers his hand to fall and rises to the seventh heaven.
He ascends the torrent of ages, and takes from their cradle all
sciences, the object of which is the gratification of taste. He
follows their progress through the night of time and seeing that
in the pleasures they procure us, early centures were not so great
as those which followed them: he takes his lyre and sings in the
Dorian style the elegy which will be found among the varieties at
the end of the volume.]