ashamed of many parts of it; and I am confident my language has made you smile. But perhaps an apology may be urged in my behalf: the subject is entirely new, and the work was written at a time when the mind was in that fickle and inconstant state, so frequently the attendant and consequence of disease. Notwithstanding all its imperfections, I am not sorry that I have given the work to the public: I have at least the credit of having directed the attention of the world to a curious and interesting inquiry— but peculiarly so to an American. You will say, my hypotheses are puerile and crude; but can they be more so than the hypotheses of antiquaries on most subjects?—I think not. You will also say I should have suffered my work to lie on the shelf for a few years; but then the facts I have given to the world would have been all this time unknown." These frank confessions of faults do honour to a young author, more especially, to one who afterwards acquired so much literary fame as the late Professor Barton. They are introduced on this occasion, as a laudable example of candour, in a man of great intellectual powers—as one worthy of being imitated by all young authors too tenacious of their own opinions. Yet after all, the book in question, is by no means so deficient in merit, as its author, himself, seemed to consider it. On the contrary, it does credit to so young a writer.
For reasons which he communicated to his brother by a letter dated at London, the 2d of February, 1789, Dr. Barton chose to obtain his medical diploma from the celebrated German university, founded by George the II, at Gottingen, in the duchy of Brunswick, rather than to apply for one which he was entitled to receive, from the university of Edinburgh. With these reasons, there might, perhaps, have been blended some degree of dissatisfaction with the deportment of two of the professors in the medical school of the latter, towards him; one of these, to whom on his arrival at Edinburgh he presented an highly recommendatory letter from his preceptor in medicine, professor Shippen—never showed him the slightest attention; and the conduct of the other was, as he conceived, reprehensible for a similar cause. Yet, while he acknowledged with gratitude and a commendable pride, the very polite and friendly attention with which he was honoured by all the other professors, it can scarcely be doubted that circum-
