butter. You are always at some queer thing or other!' I bought a leaden comb, intended to dye the hair, it being supposed that the application of lead will have this effect. I did not try: but I divided the comb into two, separating the part of closed prongs from the other; and thus I had two ruling machines. The lead marks paper, and by drawing the end of one of the machines along a ruler, I could rule twenty lines at a time, quite fit to write on. I thought I should have killed a friend to whom I explained it: he could not for the life of him understand how leaden lines on paper would dye the hair.
But Dr. Milner went beyond me. He wanted a seat suited to his shape, and he defied opinion to a fearful point. He spread a thick block of putty over a wooden chair and sat in it until it had taken a ceroplast copy of the proper seat. This he gave to a carpenter to be imitated in wood. One of the few now living who knew him—my friend, General Perronet Thompson—answers for the wood, which was shown him by Milner himself; but he does not vouch for the material being putty, which was in the story told me at Cambridge; William Frend also remembered it. Perhaps the Doctor took off his great seal in green wax, like the Crown; but some soft material he certainly adopted; and very comfortable he found the wooden copy.
The same gentleman vouches for Milner's lamp: but this had visible science in it;
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the vulgar see no science in the construction of the chair. A hollow semi-cylinder, but not with a circular curve, revolved on pivots. The curve was calculated on the law that, whatever quantity of oil might be in the lamp, the position of equilibrium just brought the oil up to the edge of the cylinder, at which a bit of wick was placed. As the wick exhausted the oil, the cylinder slowly revolved about the pivots so as to keep the oil always touching the wick.
Great discoveries are always laughed at: but it is very often not the laugh of incredulity; it is a mode of distorting the sense of inferiority into a sense of superiority, or a mimicry of superiority interposed between the laugher and his feeling of inferiority. Two persons in conversation agreed that it was often
