young professer of medicine, if God has given him comprehension, assiduity, and energy, should devote his nights and days to studying this great work. It will teach him more than the pages of Galen and Hippocrates; than schools and universities know to impart. Those instructions which, through the channel of its pages, flow to the world, enabled Dr. Robert Darwin of Shrewsbury to attain instant eminence as a physician in that country, at his first outsetting, and in the bloom of scarcely ripened youth; to continue a course of practice, which has been the blessing of Shropshire; its sphere expanding with his growing fame. That son, who joins to a large portion of his father's science and skill, all the ingenuous kindness of his mother's heart. That son, whose rising abilities and their early eclat, recompensed to Dr. Darwin a severe deprivation in the death of his eldest and darling son, Charles, of whom this memoir has already spoken. He was snatched from the world in the prime of his youth, and with the highest character at the university of Edinburgh, by a putrid fever, supposed to have been caught from dissecting, with a slightly wounded finger, a corps in a state of dan. gerously advanced putrefaction. When society became deprived of his luxuriantly blossoming talents, Mr. Charles Darwin had resently received an hono rary medal from the Society of Arts and Sciences, for having discovered a criterion by which pus may be distinguished from mucus. A few years before Dr. Darwin left Lichfield as a residence he commenced a botanical society in that city. It consisted of himself, Sir Brooke Boothby, then Mr. Boothby, and a proctor in the Cathedral jurisdiction, whose name was Jackson. Sprung from the lowest possible origin, and wholly uneducated, that man had, by the force of literary ambition and unwearied industry, obtained admittance into the courts of the spiritual law, a profitable *share of their emoluments, and had made a tolerable proficiency in the Latin and French languages. His life, which closed at sixty, was probably shortened by late acquired habits of ebriety. He passed through its course a would-be philosopher, a turgid and solemn coxcomb, whose morals were not the best, and who was vain of launching his pointless sneers Revealed Riligion. Jackson admired Sir Brooke Boothby, and worshipped and aped Dr. Darwin. He became a useful drudge to each in their joint work, the translation of the Linnæn system of vegetation into English from the Latin. His illustrious coadjutors exacted of him fidelity to the sense of their author, and they corrected Jackson's inelegant English, weeding it of its pompous coarseness. The Doctor was probably disappointed that no recruits flocked to his botanical standard at Lichfield. The young men of the genteel classes in that city devoted themselves to professions with which natural history had no inseparable connexion. However useful, entertaining, and creditable might be its studies, they felt little desire to deck the board of session, the pulpit, or the ensigns of war, with the Linnæen wreaths and the chemical crystalines. Thus the original triumvirate received no augmentation, yet the title was maintained. Various observations, signed Lichfield Botanical Society, were sent to the periodical publications, and it was amusing to hear sientific travellers, on their transit over Lichfield, inquiring after the state of the botanical society there. About the year 1779, at the house of his friend, Mr. Sneyd of Belmont, whose seat in the wild and hilly part of Staffordshire Moorlands is eminent for its boldly romantic features, Dr. Darwin wrote an address to its owner, from the Naiad of that scene. Her rivulet originally took its course along the deep bottom of cradling woods, luxuriantly clothing the steeply sloping mountains, which a rough glen, and this its brook, divided. Mr. Sneyd caused the rough and tangled glen to be cleared aird hollowed into one entire basin, which the brook immediately filled with the purest and most transparent water. Only a very narrow, marginal path is left on each side, between the water and those high woody mountains whieh shut the liquid scene from every other earthly object. This lake covers more than five acres, yet is not more than seventy yards across, at the broadest part. The length is, therefore, considerable. It gradually narrows on its flow, till suddenly, and with loud noise, it is precipitated down a craggy, dark, ling and nearly perpendicular fall of forty feet. The stream then takes its natural channel, losing itself in the sombre and pathless woods which stretch far onward. While we walk on the brink of this liquid concave; while we listen to the roar, with which the tumbling torrent passes away; while we look up on each side, to the umbrageous eminences which leave us only themselves, the water, and the sky, we are impressed with a sense of solemn seclusion, and might fancy ourselves in the solitudes of Tinian or Juan-Fernandes. The trees and shrubs which, from such great elevation, impend over the flood, give it their own green tint without lessening its transparency. Glassy smooth, this lake has not a wave till within a few yards of its precipitance, But it is time to introduce Dr. Darwin's verses already mentioned. They were written before the existence of the Lake, and while the brook, which formed it, had the silence imputed to it by the poet. Address of a water Nymph at Belmont, to the Owner of that place. To mix my chaste wave with immodest wine, The exortation was not disobeyed; the benediction was not fruitless. Mr. Sneyd still lives to exhilarate the spirits of his friends, and to be the blessing of his neighbourhood. The duties of a public magistrate, exerted with energy, and tempered with kindness; the hospitality of his social mansion; his pursuit of natural history, and taste for the arts, are unlessened by time, and no corporal infirmity allays their enjoyment. After a lapse of seventy years he passes several hours every day, |