Count Rumford

THE name of Count Rumford was a very familiar one in the ears of our fathers and grandfathers. For many years he was a very famous man on both sides of the Atlantic, and his fame was an honest one, of which his fellow-countrymen, though not his fellow-citizens, might be justly proud. Though his American contemporaries had lived during the days of the Revolutionary War and felt the natural antipathy to such of their countrymen as had taken sides with the Crown in that great struggle, they seem to have condoned the offence of Benjamin Thompson sooner and more entirely than that of many others who were no greater sinners than he. The eminence which he attained so early and maintained so long, his civil and scientific distinction, and his reputation as a philanthropist and a philosopher, as well as his success as a courtier, probably had a softening influence upon their patriotic prejudices, or rather their just censures, in regard to him. He had given intelligence and counsel to the Ministry of Lord North in the closet, and had drawn his sword in the field to reduce the rebellious subjects of George III. to obedience and loyalty, and had received the honor of knighthood as a mark of his Majesty’s sense of his services. But the brilliant career upon which he entered and the European fame which he acquired soon after the independence of the United States was established, gratified the pride and touched the imagination of the people whom he always loved though he had turned his back upon them, and led them to forgive and forget the sins or the errors of his youth. And he himself made what amends he could for his youthful endeavors to defeat the independence of his country by liberal endowments for her advancement in science and the useful arts. The lapse of five-andfifty years since his death have naturally swept him and his memory beyond the knowledge of the mass of the present generation. Very many doubtless have no idea whatever excited by his name, or only that of the “ Roasters ” bearing it, which may yet possibly survive in some old-fashioned kitchens as well as in the memories which go back to the old days of smoke-jacks and wood-fires, when that invention was the latest of economical devices The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, therefore, have done wisely as well as gratefully in collecting and reprinting the works of Count Rumford, their chiefest benefactor, and thus providing the monument to his memory that would have best pleased himself; and, yet more, in procuring his Life to be written by the Rev. Dr. George E. Ellis, who has brought to his work a zeal, a skill, and an industry which has exhausted his subject and given to literature one of the most interesting biographies in the language. In the brief monograph for which only the crowded pages of the Atlantic can find room, all we can hope to do is, to direct the curiosity of its readers to the fuller and richer narrative of Count Rumford’s biographer.

The career of Count Rumford, though romantic from the changes of condition, the diversities of scene, and the varieties of society through which it conducted him, was the natural result of opportunities well seized and ably improved. Its several steps followed each other regularly enough ; but they never could have led him up to the social heights he reached, had he not had the original constitution and the acquired aptitude that enabled him to make sure of each successive foothold in his ascent. He came of a good New England yeoman race, which took root in the soil at the time of the emigration of Winthrop, and had flourished well there. He was born March 26, 1753, in the pleasant town of Woburn, where the farm-house in which its most famous son first saw the light is yet shown with an honest pride. In the frugal plenty of a New England farmer’s family Benjamin Thompson passed his childhood, a handsome, lively, intelligent boy. His father dying when he was but three years old, his mother married a neighboring farmer, whom Dr. Ellis takes pains to vindicate from some charges of step-parental unkindness which Count Rumford was understood by some of his European friends to have made against him. His warm affection for his mother, of which he gave abundant proofs as long as she lived, would seem to show that his home could not have been an unhappy one. He went to the excellent school of Master Fowle, where a few things were taught well, as was the oldfashioned way of those times. Happily for him school grammars were not yet invented, and consequently he wrote easy, idiomatic English all Ins life. He had a marked turn for the mathematics and for mechanics, and began unconsciously to prepare himself for his later labors by his boyish inventions and contrivances. But he had no vocation whatever for the business of the farm, and so an apprenticeship to trade was looked out for him, and an advantageous one was found in Salem, under the roof and behind the counter of Mr. John Appleton. Whether he relished the details of the shop any better than those of the farm would seem doubtful, but he did not waste his time in idleness. In his leisure hours, and possibly in hours when he should have been otherwise busy, he improved himself greatly in drawing, in which he became a proficient, and in algebra, geometry, astronomy, and the higher mathematics, so that before he was fifteen he had calculated an eclipse. In these studies he was probably assisted by the Rev. Thomas Barnard, the minister on the North Parish, and his son Thomas, then keeping the grammar school, and afterwards an eminent divine and man of science. In 1769 he left Salem and became apprentice to Mr. Hopestill Capen, a dealer in the multifarious matters known then as dry goods, of his residence with whom and his value as a shopboy there appears to be but little record. That he still continued his pursuit of knowledge under difficulties appears from an account in a memorandum-book he kept of the various articles he procured to make an electrical machine. Two years later, in 1771, he turned his back upon the shop and his face towards the more attractive study of medicine. In those days before medical schools, the student in a manner apprenticed himself to some doctor by courtesy, — for as yet M. D.’s were not, — and young Thompson became an inmate of the family and a pupil, in what he could teach, of Dr. John Hay of Woburn. Here he was diligent in business and showed his zeal for improvement by walking from Woburn to Cambridge, about eight miles, to attend the lectures of John Winthrop, LL. D., the Hollisian Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. That eminent man little thought that the travel-stained lad who sat at his feet, grateful for the privilege of his instructions, would be within ten years his associate in that learned and illustrious body. In his youth Thompson enjoyed one of the greatest blessings which can be bestowed on a young man of promise,— an intelligent, steady, judicious friend, several years older than himself. This was Loammi Baldwin, afterwards colonel in the Revolutionary Army, and subsequently an engineer of the first class. This friendship endured as long as Colonel Baldwin lived, and was inherited by his three sons, all of them eminent men in the same line as their father, and by the daughter of Count Rumford. To the youngest of these gentlemen, Mr. George Rumford Baldwin, who is still living, Dr. Ellis was indebted for much valuable material for his work.

But fate had higher things in store for young Thompson than the life of a New England country doctor. Going to Rumford in New Hampshire, now Concord, to keep the grammar school there, his handsome face, fine person, and the native elegance of his manners, won the affections of a rich widow, Rolfe by name, who bestowed upon him her fortune and mature charms. He was but nineteen, while she was thirty-three, with one son, to whom a daughter was added in fulness of time, who was afterwards the Countess Sarah de Rumford. This marriage maybe regarded as the point upon which his fortunes turned, as it was the occasion of introducing him into a higher sphere of society than any he had yet entered, whose political coloring naturally gave a tinge to the opinions of an ambitious youth. His predecessor, Colonel Rolfe, was one of the principal gentlemen of the Province, whose respectability Mr. Carlyle himself must admit, as it is established by the fact of his keeping, not “ a gig,” but a curricle. Mrs. Thompson’s father, too, the Rev. Timothy Walker, was a man of public as well as parochial importance, who had been sent three times to England on provincial business. On their wedding tour, therefore, the bride naturally directed the wheels of the curricle to the centre of New Hampshire high life at Portsmouth, where she introduced her young husband to Governor John Wentworth, afterwards Sir John and a baronet, in recognition of his loyal services, who graduated at Harvard in 1755 along with a man of a very different career, President John Adams. The colonial discontents were then fast ripening into rebellion, and Governor Wentworth doubtless was on the lookout for promising young men whom he could attract or secure to the royal side in the conflict likely to ensue. The manners, appearance, and position, through his rich marriage, of young Thompson,drew his Excellency’s attention to him, and he appointed him Major of the Second New Hampshire Regiment. The officers over whose heads he was thus summarily raised were naturally ill-pleased at this arbitrary interference with their promotion, and this was doubtless an element of the suspicions as to Thompson’s patriotism, which helped decide his choice of sides. He had also been with his wife to Boston, and received flattering attentions from Governor Gage and the brilliant circle of Tory society of which he was the head, and the extinction of which was a serious, if an unavoidable, loss to Massachusetts and the country. At any rate, with cause or without, violent suspicions were excited as to the patriotism of Thompson, and he was summoned before a committee of the inhabitants of Concord to give an account of himself. Though no evidence could be found against him to justify his condemnation even by such a tribunal, a few months later he had intelligence of an intended visit of a mob, and only avoided its violence by a timely retreat to Woburn. Thither, however, the same jealous suspicions pursued him and at last resulted in his arrest and confinement for trial. He was discharged after a trial by the town of Woburn, to whom his case had been referred by the Provincial Congress, after which he visited Cambridge, and, it has been supposed, endeavored to obtain a commission from Washington. If so, he was disappointed, the doubts as to the sincerity of his patriotism probably standing in his way, confirmed by the undisguised distrust of the New Hampshire officers, who refused to have anything to do with him. Thompson, who was not inclined to be a martyr, and who certainly was no hero, determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. So he was driven by his half-brother to some point on the shore of Narragansett Bay, in October, 1775, and took boat for the Scarborough man-of-war, by which he was brought round to Boston, then closely besieged by the Continental army.

Thompson soon proceeded to England and reported himself at the War Office. Either the information he could give, or his attractive manners and appearance, recommended him to the especial notice of Lord George Germain, the War Secretary, He received a clerkship in the office, and was in such favor with his chief that he dined and supped almost every day at his Lordship’s house. He pursued his scientific experiments in his leisure hours, which were directed mainly at that time to improvements in the manufacture of gunpowder and of artillery. His undoubted talents, aided by his agreeable address, introduced him to men of rank and to men of science,— among others to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society. At five or six and twenty he was elected a Fellow of that Society,—we rather think the only man who attained that distinction at so early an age. It must have been an intoxicating success for a young man so fond of pleasure and distinction, to find himself transported from the narrow and provincial circles in which his life had been passed, to the society of the great and the learned of the metropolis and received by them on a footing of such gratifying equality. At seven - and - twenty he was made Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department, which office he retained till the impending fall of Lord George Germain, his especial patron, — compelled by the ill-success of the war and the persistent and fierce attacks of the mighty Opposition of that day, — caused him to resign. During these years of prosperity Thompson must have been the subject of much talk and we fear of some envy to the unfortunate little colony of impoverished loyalists who were living from hand to mouth in London. One of the most respectable of them, Samuel Curwen of Salem, must have been particularly struck by the changes which a dozen years had produced, when he found himself humbly soliciting the interposition in his favor of “a young man,” who “when a shop-lad to his next neighbor, ever appeared active, good-natured, and sensible,” and who was then an Under Secretary ! On leaving this office, Thompson was commissioned as lieutenantcolonel, and proceeded to America some time in the autumn of 1781, to raise his regiment. He was probably on the ocean at the time when the Surrender of Cornwallis gave the finishing stroke to the war for the subjugation of America. On arriving at Charleston he received the command of what was left of the royal cavalry there. The only actual brush with the enemy which he appears ever to have had was a successful one, and the more flattering as it was against “Marion’s Men,” famous in story and song. For this success he was thanked in General Orders by General Leslie. He soon proceeded to New York, and was employed in no glorious services on Long Island, where his memory is yet unfragrant in men’s minds. Still they were such as to call forth high praise in the despatches of Sir Guy Carleton and to procure for him the full rank of colonel in the army, which secured him half-pay for life.

Had Thompson’s career ended here he would have been remembered, if at all, only as a lucky adventurer, promoted above his deserts for ignoble services against the country of his birth. A higher destiny awaited him, which he proceeded at once to meet. The general peace having fortunately closed the career of arms to his ambition, he obtained leave to travel on the Continent. His crossing of the Channel is immortalized by a letter of Gibbon, who was his fellow-passenger, to Lord Sheffield, and who calls him “ Mr. Secretary, Colonel, Admiral, Philosopher Thompson.” The great historian records also the fact that his companion had three horses with him, which were not the most agreeable fellow-passengers. Oddly enough, the prosperous Tory had also for a fellow-passenger one who had suffered a year’s imprisonment in the Tower for the treason of serving their common country, and who could hardly have regarded the well-mounted Colonel with much complacency. This was Henry Laurens, sometime President of Congress, and one of the commissioners for negotiating the Treaty of 1783. At Strasburg Colonel Thompson met Prince Maximilian, the nephew of thereigning Elector of Bavaria, a young man ot twentyseven. The graces of Thompson’s person and address doubtless recommended him to the favor of the young prince, who introduced him to his uncle. This petty sovereign must have had a discerning of spirits, for he almost immediately sought the services of the new-comer both in a civil and military capacity. Not inclined to baffle Fortune, Thompson returned to England to obtain the royal permission. This was not only granted, but the honor of knighthood superadded, and he returned to Munich Sir Benjamin Thompson, soon to reach higher honors. On his arrival the Elector made him General Aide de Camp and Colonel of Cavalry, and took him into his most intimate confidence. Although his first promotion in the Electoral service was military, the attention of SitBenjamin was mainly given to the organizing of those victories of peace on which his just renown depends.

For the details of the reformations he introduced into the military and civil affairs of Bavaria we must refer our readers to the exhaustive and deeply interesting pages of Dr. Ellis. We have room only for the briefest outline of them. Suffice it to say that he succeeded in solving the difficult problem of reconciling the apparently incompatible conditions of a regular soldier and an industrious husbandman and intelligent laborer, improving his moral and physical surroundings while adding to his comfort and increasing his efficiency. His second labor was a more truly herculean one than this, and was completely successful. Bavaria was eaten up by pauperism and beggary, in town and country. This had been long the despair of her ministers of state and of religion. It was reserved for an adventurer from beyond seas to free the state from these cleaving mischiefs. Thompson laid his plans so wisely and took his precautions so prudently that the miracle was accomplished in one day. On the morning of the 1st of January, 1790, the hosts of beggary went forth in their strength to spoil the land. Before night they were all under arrest and the next morning humanely provided for. The helpless and impotent were made more comfortable than they had ever been before, while the sturdy and able-bodied were set to work and made useful members of society. And this was done with so much discretion and wise humanity, that no vested interest or even prejudice was disturbed, while the whole population breathed freer at being released from this odious burden. Even the ancient guild of the beggars was so tenderly dealt with that they blessed the change which had abolished it ; and on one occasion when their benefactor was ill, they went in procession to the cathedral to offer up prayers for his recovery ; and on another, they set apart an hour every day for the same service in his behalf. For his other efforts in the direction of agriculture, of the improvement of breeds, of the introduction of new edibles and notably of the potato, of economy in the preparation of food, all tending to the material and physical comfort of all classes, but especially of the poor, we must again refer the reader to Dr, Ellis. One of his achievements, however, must not be omitted. Near Munich lay a neglected waste of forest and swamp, which had neither use nor beauty, though capabilities for both. These he seized and literally made the desert blossom, turning it into a picturesque park, with pleasure-grounds and a model farm, for the pleasure of the inhabitants ; it is still known as the English Garden,” and fitly marked by a monument in honor of its contriver.

After the death of the Emperor Joseph II., in February, 1790, the Elector of Bavaria exercised the imperial functions as Vicar of the Empire, until the election of Leopold II. He used his temporary authority to elevate his American friend to the rank of a count of the Holy Roman Empire, — of which Voltaire once sneeringly said that it was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire, — and in selecting the place from which his title was to be taken the new count made choice of Rumford, the scene of his earliest worldly prosperity. He also received the order of the White Eagle, having been before invested with that of St. Stanislas. Neither his public duties nor his honors, however, diverted Count Rumford from his scientific experiments, especially as to heat, nor from the preparation of his essays, the object of which was to spread the knowledge of his various successful attempts to improve the condition of mankind. All his philosophical speculations had this end in view ; and to whatever parts of the Continent his travels might take him, he endeavored to leave behind him improved conditions as to the economy of heat, applied to cookery and the saving of fuel. In 1795 he returned to England for the purpose of printing his Essays, and renewing his old associations there. He was received with great distinction. During his residence in London he took great pains to make known his various inventions for the construction of fireplaces, the cure of smoky chimneys, the economical application of heat for the warmth of houses and in the preparation of food, giving his own personal attention to the least inviting details. It was at this visit that he established the fund for the Rumford Medals to be awarded by the President and Council of the Royal Society to the author of the most useful discovery as to Light or Heat. The first award was made to himself. About the same time he made a similar foundation for America, and intrusted its charge and the dispensation of the medals it was to furnish to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By his last will Count Rumford made Harvard College his residuary legatee for the purpose of founding a professorship to teach the application of Science to the Arts of Life. To the professorship thus established the University has owed the public instructions of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, Mr. Daniel Treadwell, Mr. E. N. Horsford, and it is now worthily filled by Dr. Wolcott Gibbs.

All this time the wife and daughter of Count Rumford remained in America, where the former died in 1792, in her fifty-third year. His marriage had been no doubt, on his side, a mariage de convenance, and he appears to have borne the absence of his elderly wife with much resignation. We do not know that there is any evidence as to how she felt about this separation, the years of which she spent at Concord, New Hampshire, in the house built by her first husband, Colonel Rolfe, perhaps as happily, and certainly more tranquilly, than if she had followed her volatile husband in all his erratic career. Their only daughter, Sarah, whom he had left a child of two or three years old, was now grown up to womanhood and her father “ wished exceedingly to be personally acquainted ” with her. This not unnatural or unreasonable desire was gratified in the spring of 1796, when the young Countess Sarah rejoined her father in London. She was in her twenty-second year, a well-grown young woman, not uncomely, and with as good an education as was given in those days to girls. Her father treated her with great kindness, though now and then annoyed by the mistakes into which she fell through her inexperience in etiquette and in economy. In her old age she wrote down, for the gratification of one of her friends, her recollections of her life, which Dr. Ellis was permitted to use, and from which he has judiciously made ample extracts. It makes no pretensions to literary excellence, but is an artless, ingenuous, lively account of her adventures, her love-passages, her differences with her father, her experience of society, and of the way of living, so new to her, of London and Munich, such as a cheerful old lady, in gossiping mood, might give to an intimate and intelligent friend, over the tea-table or the embroidery-frame. We only regret that the inexorable limitations of this article must preclude our giving our readers such extracts as we would gladly lay before them. In London the young Countess was introduced into the circle of her father’s friends, among whom, were Lord and Lady Palmerston, the parents of the famous minister, and Sir Joseph and Lady Banks. At the house of the latter she was occasionally admitted to the dinners which the President gave to the Fellows of the Royal Society, and thus had an opportunity, which she properly esteemed, of listening to the conversation of many of the most eminent men of the time. In the autumn of the same year the Count and his daughter returned to Munich, and arrived at the moment when the independence of Bavaria was threatened by the French under Moreau on the one side, and the Austrians under the Archduke Charles on the other. The Elector, on leaving his dominions for Saxony, invested Rumford with full civil and military authority in his place, and it was owing to the spirit and skill with which the Count exercised these functions that the neutrality of the Electorate was maintained for a while longer.

On the return of the Elector to Munich, Count Rumford was appointed to the head of the Department of General Police, which we take to have been the most responsible and important ministry in the government. These duties he performed in an admirable manner, all the time continuing his speculations and experiments for the improvement of men’s condition. The account given by his daughter, in the sketch just mentioned, of the court life at Munich, of their manner of living, of her lovers and friends, and of the tours she took with her father, are entertaining in a high degree, and his readers will thank Dr. Ellis for having given them so much of it. But we must pass it all over in reluctant silence. In 1798 the Elector, as a marked proof of his approbation and friendship, appointed Count Rumford his Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James, and he and his daughter proceeded thither in the early autumn. To his great regret and mortification, the king refused to receive him in his diplomatic capacity, on the ground that he was still a British subject, and, as such, could not properly represent a foreign sovereign. At this time he had serious thoughts of returning to America and settling in Cambridge for the rest of his life. And the knowledge of this fact, made known to Mr. Adams’s government by Mr. Rufus King, then in London on public business, procured for him the ofTer of the organization and superintendence of the Military Academy, then in contemplation, and the post of Inspector-General of Artillery. Count Rumford’s purpose of coming to America, which he seems very sincerely to have intended, was deferred by the plan, long contemplated, which he was now able to carry into effect, of an institution which should bring science more immediately in contact with the daily life and actual business of mankind, and especially of the laboring portion of it. As soon as his rejection as Bavarian plenipotentiary was decided, he applied himself, with his usual zeal and skill in organizing, to the establishment of the Royal Institution for the Diffusion of Science and Useful Knowledge and the Encouragement of Useful Inventions and Improvements. His proposals were met with great liberality, and the necessary funds at once subscribed, — a result largely due, doubtless, to the reputation their author had already acquired and the confidence felt in his knowledge and experience. The Royal Institution was chartered in 1800, and is still in active and useful existence, an enduring monument of its tounder. Rumford’s original plan was to make it the means of “ teaching the practical application of scientific discoveries to the improvement of arts and manufactures and to the increase of domestic comfort and convenience.” And his plan included a museum, so to speak, of various useful inventions, with models actually at work for the instruction of mechanics, and particularly such as related to the economical application of heat to warming houses and cooking food, though all other inventions were to be welcomed. The Institution went into successful operation on the 25th of March, being Lady Day, 1800, and remained for some time under the superintendence of Count Rumford himself, who had rooms in the building provided for it in Albemarle Street. This must have been a sacrifice of his personal comfort, as it required him to leave a house in Brompton Row, which he had fitted up after his own heart as a model private residence. It was long shown as one of the curiosities of London ; but we believe it was never imitated in all its eccentric arrangements by any one else. To this home he returned after living at the Institution for some eighteen months, and resided there mainly till he finally left England, in May, 1802.

The interesting details touching the Royal Institution our readers will find set forth at large by Dr. Ellis. It is enough to say here, that the plan ot Count Rumford was found to be impracticable to the extent be had proposed for it, and that the Institution gradually became a means for the advancement of science itself, rather than for its application to the immediate uses of life. But as Science always sooner or later descends from her airy heights to dwell among the homes and haunts of men, the philanthropic purpose of the founder of the Institution cannot be said to have been defeated or hardly delayed. It has been of infinite value for the impulse it has given to chemistry, through the labors of Davy and Faraday, of which it was the scene, while the lectures of Sydney Smith, and Sir John Lubbock and Max Müller, among many others, show that metaphysics, the philosophy of human origin, and philological research, have not been neglected. The intense labors of Count Rumford for many years, the jealousies and vexations to which his later years in the Elector’s service had subjected him, and the mortification incident to his rejection as a diplomate, had affected his health and his temper also. It is a melancholy fact, that philosophers are not always philosophical, and there is too much reason to believe that the later months of his connection with his Institution were imbittered by differences, not to say quarrels, with his associates and subordinates. And his personal interest in it, after leaving England, was naturally diminished by what he must have regarded as its perversion from the uses for which he had devised it. But the impress of his genius which he left upon it, and the vitality his energy imparted to it, still remain full and perfect, and will keep his memory fresh in the minds of those who receive its benefits as long as it shall exist.

We have now seen Count Rumford at the height of his reputation, which was very great and extensive at the beginning of this century, and at the summit of his prosperity. The favor of the Elector he found undiminished on his visits to Munich, and he had every gratification that public and private recognition of his good service to mankind could give him. After the preliminaries of the peace of Amiens had opened France to English travel, Count Rumford visited Paris, where he had a most brilliant and gratifying reception, which he described as “ simply enchantment.” It was the culmination of his happier days. The later years ot his life were darkened by imperfect health and domestic infelicities. During this visit to Paris he made the acquaintance ot Madame Lavoisier, the widow of the great chemist, who, when condemned to the guillotine by the Revolutionary tribunal, asked in vain for a few days more of life, merely that he might finish some experiments on which he was engaged. She was a handsome woman, of fine manners and a large fortune, and of suitable age, being four years younger than he, and there seemed to be every probability that the marriage which was arranged between them, and which took place in 1804, would be a congenial and happy one. They had a large house, with two acres of land about it, in the very heart of Paris, near the Champs Elysées, where they received the best company in Paris. A dinner every Monday to philosophers, members of the Institute, and celebrated ladies, and a reception, as it would be called in this country, every Thursday to all the polite world, made the house in the Rue d’Anjou a gay centre of science and of fashion. But though gay, it was not a happy one. Indeed, the young Countess implies that the very gayety was a main cause of the domestic discrepancies of her father and step-mother. His taste was for retirement and study, and these interruptions irritated and annoyed him. Then he bad lived for twenty years a bachelor’s life, and had been accustomed to find ladies only too yielding and affectionately inclined towards him, for his principles and his life were by no means free from the laxity, in that regard, of the countries in which he had lived so long. His manners, too, by the evidence of his admiring friend Cuvier, had suffered change since the clays of their earlier fascination, and it is likely that his disagreements with Madame Lavoisier de Rumford—as she chose to be styled, to the disgust of the Count — were not marked by the suavity and grace of his antenuptial courtesy. That “ there were faults on both sides,” according to the good-natured formula of the world in such cases, we think is plain as to this one. If it were true, as he wrote to his daughter, that after their grand Monday’s dinners, they “lived on the bits the rest of the week,” it hardly justified him in locking the gate of the porter’s lodge and taking away the keys in the faces of a large party which had been invited, as he thought, for the express purpose of vexing him. But then again, great as was her provocation, when she poured boiling water over his beautiful flowers, of which he was passionately fond, we think it must be allowed that Madame transcended the allowable limits of matrimonial expostulation. When matters had reached this pass the wisest thing that they could do was to undo, as far as possible, the foolish thing they had done in ever coming together. So on the 30th of June, 1809, they separated, amicably as far as money matters were concerned, the Count removing to a house at Auteuil and Madame remaining in that in the Rue d’Anjou. Though separated, they remained on civil terms and occasionally met ; and when the daughter presently arrived from America, whither she had returned ten years before, her stepmother showed her kindly attentions. In this house, remarkable as having been the residence of Madame Helvetius, between whom and Franklin the gossips of the day had made a match, and in our time as the scene of the murder of Victor Noir by that worthy scion of the lowest Empire, Pierre Bonaparte, the Count spent the rest of his life, and here he died after a very short illness, on the 21st of August, 1814, in his sixty-second year.

Count Rumford was neither a hero nor a saint. He loved pleasure and distinctions and celebrity, and his life was filled to overflowing with all these. But he won his fame and his rank by good service to mankind, the benefits of which survive him to this day. He

was the first to look at the dreadful problems of pauperism and mendicity in the light of science and the laws of human nature, and to endeavor to solve them on scientific and humane principles. His success was great in this direction, and showed how society might be relieved in a good measure of the burden of pauperism and mendicity, while at the same time improving the habits and the comfort of the dependent classes. His precepts are at this moment applied to practice in the public charitable institutions of this city. Besides his efforts for the amelioration of the condition of the very poorest classes, he gave most of his time and attention to considering how the comforts of all conditions might be increased and cheapened by improvements in chimneys, in grates and fireplaces, in kitchen apparatus, and in the preparation of food. Many of his specific inventions may have become obsolete, but almost every one that has taken their place, having for its object the economizing of heat and the saving of fuel, owes its perfection, if not its existence, to the principles which he developed. His “ Roasters ” have passed away ; but the ovens of our best anthracite ranges are constructed, as we believe, on precisely his idea of the best method of conducting heat around the cavity containing the food. The angle which the backs of our open fireplaces make with the mouth of the chimney, improving the draught and increasing the warmth, we owe to him. Indeed, we enter into the labors of Count Rumford every day of our lives, without knowing it or thinking of him. And he had his exceeding great reward. His homely efforts for the daily comfort of mankind led him to the discoveries which have made his name illustrious as a philosopher. His great contributions to science in the development of the correlation and indestructibility of forces, of the relations or rather the identity of force and heat, place him among the foremost discoverers in the world of science. By his experiments he overthrew the theories as to the nature of heat, which had been taken for granted by natural philosophers from the time of Aristotle, and established the true doctrine upon which every succeeding advance of knowledge in that direction rests, and without which none could have been made. The mighty and beneficent agents of light and heat were the objects of his intense study, that he might ascertain how they could best be made to answer the benevolent intentions of the Creator in promoting the happiness of mankind. And his forecasting mind provided fit honors to be bestowed, on either continent, after his death, on his successors in the same line of investigation and discovery. Dr. Ellis’s account of the methods and results of Rumford’s experiments is lucid and interesting in a high degree, and we doubt not will lead many of his readers to the Essays themselves, from which it is taken. We again commend this very valuable and most entertaining work, which, it is proper to say, is a labor of love on the part of the author and a free gift to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, to the reading public, assured that they will think we have spoken none too highly of the industry, candor, and literary skill which mark its execution. And we also believe that they will leave it with the conviction that its subject, whatever may have been his vanities, his weaknesses, and his infirmities of temper and of life, was one who loved his fellow-men, and who deserved, by his services in their behalf, the great and beneficent name he has left behind him as a philosopher and a philanthropist.

Edmund Quincy.