established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market.
The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and
next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of
London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received
great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make
deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke;
but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes
hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining
hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual
motion -- capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed
of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and
repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the
clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should
have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on
the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the
foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this
company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and
preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other,
the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown
adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great
advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by
scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that
any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius
who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity,
merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a
million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds
per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to
100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be
obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but
promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced,