minute's time; besides which were his famous little posture-master, musical clocks, Venetian automata, and seapieces with naumachia. The advertisement of one of the theatres-we are half afraid it is a hoax, yet it occurs, we believe, in the 'Daily Advertiser'-states that the performances are in honour of the presence of Adomo Oronooko Tomo, sent to see the kingdom of Great Britain by the Great Trudo, Audato, Povesaw, Danjer, Eujo Suveveto, king of Dawhomay.' His highness was to be amused with the humours of Sir John Falstaff, altered from Shakspeare. Near Charing-cross was an exhibition advertised of a little man 32 years old, and 36 inches high, with his wife of the same age, and under 36 inches, and a little horse 24 inches high, and a satyr that had a head like a child. Charging for advertising commenced at a very early period. A few might at first have been inserted gratuitously, but the revenue flowing from this source was so obvious a consideration, that the practice soon began of charging a fixed sum for each. In the Mercurius Librarius,' a bookseller's paper, it is stated that, 'To show that the publishers design the public advantage of trade, they will expect but sixpence for inserting any book, nor but twelve pence for any other advertisement, relating to the trade, unless it be excessive long.' The next intimation of price is in the Jockey's Intelligencer,' which charged a shilling for each, and sixpence for renewing. The Observator,' in 1704, charged a shilling for eight lines; and the Country Gentleman's Courant,' in 1706, inserted advertisements at twopence a line. The Public Advertiser' charged for a length of time two shillings for each insertion. It has not often been our lot to engage in a diversion which has suggested so many solemn and mournful thoughts as this. We have heard the very voices of the past speaking to us. A century and a half has been living before our eyes-where are they now?-their pas sions, pleasures, wants, amusements, eccentricities, wisdom, and folly, hushed in the cold silence of the unsparing tomb. Surely said the preacher, ' Vanity of vanities -all is vanity.' We began our paper in mirth, we are constrained to end it with a touch of gravity. THE COMMON NETTLE. One of the plants which follow the footsteps of man, and which often indicates by its presence the situations on which cottages stood in some of the now thinly-peopled or deserted Highland glens. Thus, while proprietors of the soil, in their desire to have the exclusive use of large tracts of country, whether for sheep or for deer, make clearances of Highland glens, and endeavour to get rid of all vestiges of the peasantry who inhabited them, and lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth,' there springs up in the wild waste a plant, which marks the cottage sites as hallowed ground, and tells of the deed to future generations. The occurrence of nettles in neglected gardens and fortresses was a subject of observation in times long gone by. Thus Solomon, when speaking of the field of the slothful and the vineyard of the man void of understanding, remarks that nettles had covered the face thereof;' and the Prophet Isaiah, when alluding to the desolation which shall come on the enemies of God's people, says, 'Thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof.'-Bass Rock. LAUGHTER. 'Laugh and grow fat,' is an old adage; and Sterne tells us that every time a man laughs he adds something to his life. An eccentric philosopher of the last century used to say that he liked not only to laugh himself, but to see laughter and hear laughter. Laughter is good for health; it is a provocative to the appetite, and a friend to digestion. Dr Sydenham said the arrival of a merry-andrew in a town was more beneficial to the health of the inhabitants than twenty asses loaded with medicine. Mr Pott, a celebrated surgeon, used to say that he never saw the Tailor riding to Brentford' without feeling better for a week afterwards. MY CHILDHOOD'S TUNE. [This exquisite piece is from a little volume recently published, entitled Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems, by Frances Brown." We select it for extract, not only on account of the merit of the beauty, gentleness, and grace which characterise the volume verses themselves, but because they convey a good idea of the generally. Miss Brown is almost wholly blind-a circumstance which lends an interest to her poems, independent of that commanded by her genius.] AND hast thou found my soul again, Though many a shadowy year hath past I heard thy low notes last? They come with the old pleasant sound, I left thee far among the flowers And life hath many an early cloud That darkens as it nears the noon- That told my heart of spring begun, And voices heard, how long ago, By winter's hearth or autumn's moon !— At our last meeting, Time had much I had not seen life's harvest fado I had not learned that love, which seemed I knew not that the world's hard gold My childhood's pleasant tune! I greet thee as the dove that crossed Or shed, perchance, on graves. A simple strain to other ears, And lost amid the tumult soon; DOMESTIC DUTIES. Seeing that almost the whole of the day is devoted to business abroad, and the remainder of my time to domestic duties, there is none left to myself that is, for my studies; for on returning home, I have to talk with my wife, prattle with my children, and converse with my servants; all of which things I number among the duties of life. Since, if a man would not be a stranger in his own house, he must, by every means in his power, strive to render himself more agreeable to those companions of his life whom nature hath provided, chance thrown in his way, or that he has himself chosen.-Sir Thomas More. EDINBURGH JOURNAL CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c. No. 219. NEW SERIES. INN S. SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1848. Ir is pleasant to take one's ease in one's inn; but it is essential to the realisation of the idea that it should be a good inn. For an inn to be good, there is no necessity that it should be fine. It may be fine, and not good. The quality of goodness in an inn depends on its fulfilling the ideal of its own pretensions, whatever these are. All we require is, that it should be good of its class-that is, if it be a grand inn, that it should be grand without any derogatory slatternliness, any misapplication of servant power, or any other drawback from splendour; if a humble inn, pretending only to a moderate presentment of comforts, that it should really be a tolerable home for its own class of customers; and so forth. These postulates being attained, then we may each take our ease in our inn indeed; and a very great privilege it is to be able to do so at usually so small an expenditure of money. Duty, pleasure, whim, or whatever else, calls us out from home-we travel or ramble all day—it is perhaps a wilderness, with only a | few cottages scattered over it; but, lo! it is a post-road we are upon; and there, for certain, at the end of a few miles, rises a goodly house, furnished with all the ordinary comforts of refined life-there a smiling welcome awaits us: if wet, we are sympathised with and dried; if hungry, the table is instantly spread: we lounge over a good fire all the remainder of the evening, and for the night repose among sheets redolent of the daisies where they were bleached. Mere payment of a bill next morning, though a legal, is not a moral discharge for all these benefits. Never do I enjoy them without a personal thankfulness to the honest people who have chosen a mode of livelihood so useful and so kindly towards their fellow-creatures, as well as a more sentimental gratitude for the privilege of living in a country so settled, and so advanced in the things of civilisation, as to admit of such a regular, albeit mercantile system of hospitality. Between the highest and humblest of all things the intervals are usually enormous-for example, as has been somewhere remarked, between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the hedge parson, or between Sir Astley Cooper and the village apothecary-however they may be describable by common names, as in these cases clergyman, or doctor. So between Mivart's, with its rows of fifteen windows to Brook Street, or Douglas's and Barry's in Edinburgh, or Gresham's in Dublin, and the modest auberge of the village, with its red lion predominating over a punch-bowl,' or its black bull, with gilt hoofs and horns, the interspace is vast; and yet they all belong to the genus inn, as well as the hundred shades of variety which stand between. All, too, may have their virtues, if conducted in a fitting manner-on that everything depends. There is some PRICE 1d. thing interesting, almost awing, in an outrageously large inn. To be shown with your carpet-bag into No. 189, or 217, is of the nature of an impressive event somewhat chilling, too, perhaps, seeing how individuality sinks when you consider that you are only one of a multitude making your home for the night in this vast house. One feels in such a case of wonderfully small account in the eyes of both servants and masters. Your illness, or even death, would hardly fix their regard for a moment. The beauty, however, is in the regularity-the system. The bed-chambering power perfect as clockwork, in despite of Virgil and his varium et mutabile. Breakfasts appear at order, as if some law presided over the association of the various things on the tray and their coming up stairs. There is even a generalisation of hot shaving water which seems marvellous. One could almost suppose that boots walk down stairs, clean themselves, and come up again. Mechanical, sentimentless, cold, and unloving is the whole affair, yet how admirably adapted for a general effect in giving comfort and expeding wishes! How excellent entirely in its own way! Where small inns are tolerably well managed, I feel them to be, upon the whole, more agreeable. If newly started from a home where you are in the receipt of some daily respect as husband, father, and master, it is rather an unpleasant plunge to take your place at once as No. 217, with only a few pieces of human mechanism, in the shapes of waiter, cham'aid, and boots, floating gelidly about you. The greater conspicuousness and consequence which you attain at a small inn, makes the transition less. The gentleman in No. 5 parlour, with his two candles, is somebody. If the portmanteau and the man had alike a respectable appearance, he may depend upon the speculations of both waiter and landlord having taken a turn in his favour; the first practical result of which will probably have been a mission of the landlady to the kitchen to see that cook is sufficiently particular in doing that fowl for dinner. John, in laying the cloth, if he sees anything like an opening, will be sure to prove conversational, remarking probably on the anticipated effects of the railway commencing in autumn, which, he thinks, must for certain cause an omnibus to leave the house and come to it at least twice a-day. Or perhaps we had a great farmers' ball in the big room two nights ago, at which there were such doings. The landlord himself, if you cross him in the lobby, or saunter out upon him in front of the house, is found to observe no chilling distance-very different from the invisible deities of the grand caravansaries. You may soon wind off from him the whole chat of the country side. The landlord of such an inn is generally but a half-occupied man. The lady being always of superior importance in house management, he has no chance of keeping up in any dignity of duty, unless he has a little farm for raising the provender consumed in the house, in which case he may be enabled to consider himself as a man of some small consequence. From the general operation of this semivacuity or enforced idleness, your landlord is usually social and gossippy. Great matter it is for the superior moiety, if she only can contrive to keep him from doing any positive harm. that men should think themselves in any case above such duties. Nothing tending to useful results can be beneath a man's regard. Were men of tolerable judg ment and intelligence more generally to take a steering hand in the inns of secondary and third-rate importance, they might immensely improve them. By travelling, they might catch up many good ideas, both from the modes of management they would see in other inns, and from the remarks which they heard made by guests about particular arrangements, and the conduct of the several attendants. By exercising a real care in superintendence, instead of only promising to do so in their house-cards, they could effect wonders. The plain truth should be understood by them, that to fulfil their place in life, they must make themselves virtually the servants of those they would hope to profit by. By this we mean that nothing should be omitted which care and trouble can do, to make their guests comfortable-to make the house as home-like as possible for them. There must be no tiring in this kind of welldoing-custom should never stale the infinite variety of little attentions that gratify guests. Grant it is a slavery-are we not all slaves to each other? Who that would eat, escapes the bondage of those from whom he asks bread? The greatest difficulty is to get good servants. This is the feeblest point about most inns. Of all waiters, how few are cleanly-how few approach the tact and unobtrusive discreetness of a tolerably well-bred man-servant! Landlords little reflect, perhaps, on the shock it gives to a gentleman who is tolerably well served at home, to see his breakfast brought in by a coarse fellow with uncombed hair, unwashed hands, and unbrushed clothes, as often happens. One fault is nearly uni There is a particular class of inns above all others agreeable-those which, being situated in some favourite haunt of amusement-seekers, have only to endeavour to be agreeable places for the spending of a few days, or even of one day, and their whole function is served. No great posting system, no tavern business, no pellmell of stage-coaches, no 'commercial gentlemen' to take a lead as customers. Generally situated in some pleasant nook, with an esplanade looking out upon the lake, the vale, or whatever else the place is celebrated for; nice parlours, clean airy bedrooms, very likely a pianoforte in your room; appearances of elegant life in the people of the house, and nothing sordid or shabby in their system of entertaining and charging. Here it is truly delightful to experience that warmth of welcome which belongs to inns-light-hearted ramblings all day-the comforts of the inn in the evening. All the better if the telegraphic wires of the post-office have been cut behind you. Your ordinary world forgot: the whole sense of duty, that usually sits so heavy, thrown away for the time. Alas! what is life to the best of us but a long series of cares, with three or four such little affairs of relaxation interspersed! Inns of this pleasant kind are to be seen at Matlock, at places in the Isle of Wight-Ventnor, for instance-about the Cumberland lakes, and also in our own dear High-versal in the class, and it is a sufficiently annoying lands. Reader, there is a nook of the world called one-the want of a quiet manner. Some seem to think by a name which, ten to one, you cannot pronounce it necessary that they should walk across the floor --Drumnadrochit. Nestling in a fine glen near the with the impressiveness of the statue in Don Juan, banks of Loch Ness, it is an inn for a romance. A and set down every plate and salt-vat with a noise that Shelley might have chosen it as a retreat in which may be heard over half the house. The unsatisfactory! to compose one of his poems. Oxford students do, I points about waiters are the less endurable when we believe, haunt it as a fitting place for their summer reflect on their comparative gains. In a well-frequented studies. Of all the generation of pleasant inns, this is house, where gratuities from the guests are in practice, by many degrees the pleasantest I have ever chanced the remuneration far exceeds that usually accorded to to be in, be the rest what they may. It is more like other men of the same grade in life. Here, indeed, there that parsonage which a waggish friend recommended is a great absurdity. A gentleman calls for a glass of its non-resident tenant to advertise as a proper place soda-water, is charged eightpence, and gives the remainfor an eternal succession of honeymoon parties than ing groat to the waiter, not reflecting that the man's anything else. From the perfect resemblance which profit by the transaction exceeds that of his master, who everything bears to what you see in an ordinary house has rent and taxes to pay, a house to keep up, and bad -here, too, you find a piano in the parlour-from the debts to be made up for. The disproportion is owing to kindly simplicity of the attendants, and the neatness the shabbiness which would appertain, in appearance, to and taste presiding over all your entertainments, you more just remuneration. It is a barbarism altogether feel that you lose nothing in life by being in Inverness- this plan of securing civility from attendants at innsshire instead of at home. Such inns might be expected the very confession that it is the only way expected to in some Utopia, where mercenary feelings had given have the result is distressing, as if men were so relucway to universal kindliness and mutual serviceableness. tant towards their professed duty, that nothing but a I am not quite sure if it be a wise arrangement which particular reward for every little act could induce them gives landladies in general such a precedence over their to execute it. It is not perhaps one of the best effects lords in the management of inns. It is all very true of the system, that waiters are so often induced by their that, an inn being chiefly a domestic matter, and woman accumulations to undertake the charge of houses for being more especially the domestic sex, we may natu- themselves, while not possessed of the education and rally expect to see the lady taking a leading share of the knowledge of the habits of the upper classes which are common duty. I think it, however, a mistake to sup-required for such establishments. pose that there is not full and fitting employment for a man also about an inn. It appears to me that the energy of the male intellect would often be useful in enforcing and maintaining the necessary arrangements, and in taking advantage of circumstances that might redound to the better success of the house. It is unfortunate There is a national genius for inn-keeping; and it is to be feared that we all fall short in this respect of our continental neighbours. Amongst our own nations, the Irish are ill qualified, the Scotch moderately so, the English the best. The comparison ranks with that of the nations for business gifts generally, so that we may fairly infer that the English couple make the best land-ripe fruit, and pluck and taste it, noting at the same lord and landlady, because they can adapt themselves better than either the Scotch or Irish to that subjection of the external selfhood to the desires and needs of others which constitutes business. The Irishman is too idle for his trade, and follows the foxhounds. The Scotchman is too proud, and skulks into a sort of half farmer or grain dealer. The Englishman, alone able to surrender himself entirely to that by which he makes a penny, goes into the affair with apron and sleeves, and is a landlord in deed as in profession. LOGIC.* THE SCHOLASTIC THE words 'scholastic' and 'logic' are, to the majority of readers of books, either void of meaning, or exceedingly repulsive. But if, by a vivid historical picture, the agitation of men's minds, the excitement and the interest that have been involved in the things denoted by these terms, were once clearly brought into view, they could not occur in common speech without exciting lively emotion. The principal doctrines that made logic a body of human knowledge, were originated by the greatest scientific mind of antiquity, among a people who took extreme interest in such things, at the same time that they were excessively devoted to amusements and splendour, excitement and novelty. But the reception of Aristotelian forms of reasoning among the Greeks was cold and discouraging, compared with the reverence and enthusiasm they inspired during the latter half of the middle ages, and the earlier part of the modern age-that is, from about the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. Being applied to the most momentous discussions of religion, and the highest questions of man's social welfare, they assisted in bringing either peace or wretchedness to millions of minds, in staying or forwarding revolutions, and in subjecting the arbitrary will of despots to the universal reason of mankind. It has been truly remarked, that the infallibility of Aristotle supplanted the infallibility of the pope, and paved the way for that liberty of thought, and free use of individual reason, which is now our privilege and our boast. In modern history, logic means the artificial aids that can be given to the human understanding, to enable every man of ordinary sense and education to decide for himself in matters of religion and political right, instead of submitting implicitly to the decision of others. Like many other things that have done good in their time, and have good in them, scholastic logic has fallen into disrepute, in consequence of its abuses. In the time of its ascendancy, it was completely overdone, and mankind have not yet recovered from the disgust which it produced. And the neglect and disregard of the subject are now so great, that few of us care to know either why it was once so popular, or what was the offence that brought its popularity to an end. The name is derived from a Greek word signifying originally speech or discourse, or the communication of thought by language: and logic itself refers to the operations of reasoning that are carried on by means of language or speech. The flashes of thought that are never expressed in words, the instinctive decisions of the lower animals, what we call intuitions and inexplicable impulses, cannot come under the control of logic. A bird chooses the straws and sticks that are to build its nest by the inspiration of nature alone; or if it acquires any experience on the subject, that experience is never expressed in words or artificial signs; it is not a logos, nor a subject of logic. And in many of the decisions of the human kind, there is the same speedy, instinctive kind of operation, unconnected with words or speech. A man may see a tree laden with Formal Logic: or the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable. By Augustus De Morgan, of Trinity College, Cambridge; Professor of Mathematics in University College, London. London: Taylor and Walton. time its appearance; he may find it to be very delicious, and, in consequence, he may partake of it whenever he meets with it afterwards; and all this time he may never give it a name, nor describe it in any way, nor compare it to anything, with the view of making others know it, nor give a name to the feeling it produced in him. Yet if he recognise it a second time, and pluck and eat in consequence of the previous experience, he goes through a process of reasoning. first instance was a case of knowledge by experience, the second a case of knowledge by inference; and the native instincts of men always lead them to make such inferences. The But when names are applied to everything, and when we not only derive experience and make inferences for ourselves, but impart this experience to others, that they may have the benefit of the knowledge of the past and of the future which it contains, a new machinery is introduced, an artificial apparatus of immense extent, whose working leads us into a great many considerations that never occur to the humbler animals. We have our affirmations, our denials, our discussions, partial truth and whole truth, sophistry and delusion, misunderstanding and inconsistency, voluntary and involuntary falsehood, confusion and nonsense. Even our inferences, performed by the force of the natural instinct, are sometimes found to be contradicted by experience: our knowledge of the past fails to be a key to the future. And when language is interposed to the extent of constructing arguments, trains of reasoning, and vast complex chains of persuasion, the machinery may become too cumbrous for us, unless it is very carefully managed. In truth, if the working of this immense structure of artificial thinking is not guarded by precautions and rules, it is easy to see that it may produce endless difficulties. Logic, then, is one of the sets of rules for regulating the use of the machinery of speech. Grammar supplies rules for ordering names in groups with a view to perspicuity and facility in speaking and understanding the language, and teaches the uses of the inflexions and arrangements adopted in each particular dialect. Rhetoric lays down maxims for giving language its highest possible effect in communicating ideas and sentiments from one person to another: it teaches how to use words for the purposes of exposition, persuasion, pleasing, and for composing the works of art that are founded on speech, such as the various forms of poetry. Logic views language solely as an instrument of inference or reasoning, for extending knowledge wider than experience, for discovering the past, the future, and the distant, from the present. In so far as we reason without language, logic does not apply to our operations, any more than grammar applies to the roar of the lion, or rhetoric to the song of the nightingale. But as soon as we put our reasonings into words, or into the form that conveys them to other men's minds, there is a certain fixed character which they must have, otherwise they are bad and inadmissible, and will prove false to nature and fact when the trial is made. The scholastic logic teaches what are the shapes that reasonings stated in words must have in order to be sound and worthy of confidence, so that a man may stake his life and character on the conclusion. There is a class of people very much disposed to undervalue artificial rules of all kinds, and to uphold unassisted nature as the grand source of healthy action. The greatest works of human genius, it is said, have been produced without the help of rules: Homer and Shakspeare paid no attention to arts of poetry and laws of composition; and people ought to write, speak, think, and act as nature dictates, and then they will do their best. But without entering into the general question as to the comparative merits of the natural and the artificial, it is sufficient to say that man, by constructing a system of articulate speech, has made himself a very artificial creature. He has brought himself to communicate feeling, to think, imagine, and create by verbal machinery, and he must receive guidance in the right use of this machinery. The animal that judges by its direct senses alone, cannot go far astray; but man, who stakes his wellbeing upon hearsays and symbols, who believes in the magnitude of the earth from a few rows of ciphers, and in the existence of unseen stars by the force of a series of black scratches on a white surface, must be very attentive to the authenticity of a machinery that seems so liable to abuse. To suppose that most men can judge of a sound or unsound argument when they hear it stated, without requiring rules of logic, or any artificial help, is a mistake. The ability to judge of a chain of arguments, even in regard to the soundness of the reasoning, apart from the truth of the facts, is not the common prerogative of mankind, or one of the free gifts of nature: it is acquired only in consequence of laborious cultivation. Now, in educating people in this most desirable accomplishment, the scholastic logic used to be the branch of knowledge and discipline chiefly depended on. The scholars at all the universities were regularly drilled and exercised in bringing every kind of argument and proof under the forms laid down by the Aristotelian scholastics, and this enabled them to declare with certainty whether arguments were good or bad. The constitution of the old universities has not been altered; logic is still a part of their curriculum, but it is reduced for the most part to a branch of information instead of drill. The artificial forms of reasoning, which were once the sole matter of the instruction, are now pushed into a corner, and a great part of the session is spent in expounding human nature in general; so that the students are never so completely familiarised to the processes of logic, as to apply them afterwards in the business of life. ་ the first has occurred, we believe in the second, as its effect, with the greatest certainty: and by the help of other propositions, we can establish a murder by prussic acid, although we do not know directly that the acid was procured from a chemist, and drunk by the victim. For it is one of nature's established coincidences, that prussic acid, when acted on by certain other known substances, produces a blue colour, called prussian blue. Now, if the stomach of the dead person is put through a process of contact with these other substances, called tests, and if it bring out the prussian blue at the proper stage, this, in consequence of the invariable connection of the two things, is a proof that prussic acid has been taken. In this way we can know and believe that a thing has been done that we have not seen, or that no living man may have seen. To pass from the nature of propositions to the nature of reasoning or inference, we have to supply only one other link, and the process is complete. If it be a general proposition that prussic acid destroys human life, the only thing necessary to predict the loss of life in a particular case, is to make sure that prussic acid is really the substance administered. For if it is a general rule that some one thing is always followed by a certain other thing, we have only to establish the occurrence of the first in order to believe in the occurrence of the second. Thus we have a primary proposition that links two things, and a second proposition which makes out or asserts the existence of one of them in some individual instance; and hence the consequence or conclusion is, that the other is present. This is the process whereby we draw an inference in all cases, or acquire a piece of information that is not within the range of our experience. There are, as it were, three different steps in the operation :-The general proposition; the assertion of identity of the subject of the proposition and the subject of a case in hand; and lastly, the conclusion, or the full application of the proposition to the case. The general principle, or great fundamental discovery that logic is founded on, may be understood without much difficulty; although the complete exposition of The scholastic logicians, in recognising the three it would require perhaps about as much time and steps now mentioned as belonging to every case of study as the six books of Euclid. The principle is this: reasoning, gave them technical names, as follows:-The every step of sound reasoning may be reduced to one two first assertions they called the premises; and the general form, which exhibits clearly what is the precise third, as in ordinary speech, the conclusion. The first thing that is done when an inference is made. To assertion, which is a general proposition or affirmacomprehend exactly this universal form of the process tion of the connection of two different things, they called of reasoning, it is only necessary to conceive, first, what the major premise, or the greater proposition; and the a proposition, or assertion, or affirmation is. A propo- second assertion they termed the minor premise, or the sition brings together two things, two ideas, or two lesser proposition. Since the first proposition, or the qualities or attributes, and asserts that these two things major premise, is the general law of nature, while the are always associated; so that where one is, there the second is merely a statement that a particular case other is also. Thus, Clouds obscure the sun,' is a pro- comes under it, the first is conceived to be the more position: two distinct things are stated, and they are important of the two; hence its title of superiority. affirmed to have a certain invariable connection. The The entire operation of inference, when formally arthing we call a cloud, is one; the thing we call obscuring, ranged in its three successive parts, is called a syllogism. or hiding, or darkening the sun, is another; and it is The reasonings and arguments used in ordinary speech alleged that the two always go together. In conse- are generally stated much shorter than in the full sylquence of this connection, we can be sure of the pre- logism, and very often in such a way, that it is difficult sence of the second by merely knowing of the occurrence to distinguish the different parts that we have here set of the first. If we are told in history that in the day down; but if ever there be any doubt about the soundof a great battle the whole heaven was overcast with ness of an argument, the best way of placing it before cloud, we are sure, without being told, that the sun's the mind is to separate it into its three steps of major body was concealed, and his light very much diminished. premise, or general principle, minor premise, or assertion Wherever nature has ordained that two things shall of identity, and conclusion. This is the most advanalways accompany each other, and when man has been tageous form of looking at the case: the mind is put able to find out this connection, and state it in words into the best possible position for judging of the soundfor general information, a proposition or affirmation is ness of the inference. It is like judging of a man's arrived at which very much shortens human labour; affairs after they have been put into the orderly forms because by it we can know of the presence or absence of correct book-keeping. For if an argument is unof a thing not only by direct experience, but also by sound, the fault must lie in one or other of three things: means of its accompanying thing. When we have the major premise must be untrue, or the minor preestablished the affirmation, that prussic acid causes mise must be untrue, or the conclusion must be somedeath, if we can prove that one man administered a thing different from what the premises can support. dose of it to another who has been found dead, we con- Possibly we may not be able to say, after all, if the condemn him as a murderer without farther inquiry. We clusion is sound; we may be unable to judge if the prihave found that the taking of a certain amount of prus- mary proposition, or general law, be really true, as is sic acid, and the loss of life, are invariably associated asserted; or we may not be sure if the case mentioned by the ordination of nature; and if we are sure that in the second proposition is really a case to come under |