I understand that great confidence is placed in this discovery by the most distinguished members of the medical profession of this vicinity; and that they are disposed to regard it as an effectual method of inducing complete insensibility under the most cruel operations, by means easily applied, entirely controllable, and productive of no subsequent bad consequences. It seems not easy to overrate the importance of such a discovery.

Such is the account given of the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of ether in the original edition of this address. The opinion in the text as to the probability of some brilliant discovery within the domain of medical science was expressed in complete ignorance of the experiments then just made but not yet announced. The preceding note is believed to contain the first allusion to this all-important discovery in any non-professional publication.

NOTE C, p. 526.

Not content with having made the discovery of a new planet by a process which has excited the admiration of the scientific world, the ardent mind of M. Le Verrier is already meditating still further achievements in the same sublime field of investigation. In the fifth and last part of his memoir "On the planet that produces the perturbations of Uranus," (Comptes Rendus for October 5th, 1846, p. 659,) after pointing out with honest satisfaction that the place which he had assigned to the planet then undiscovered, on the 31st of August last, differs from its observed place by only 0° 52', he proceeds in the following striking manner: "Ainsi la position avait été prévue à moins d'un dégré près. On trouvera cet erreur bien faible, si l'on réfléchit à la petitesse des perturbations dont on avait conclu le lieu de l'astre. Ce succès doit nous laisser espérer, qu'après trente ou quarante années d'observations de la nouvelle planète, on pourra l'employer, à son tour, à la decouverte de celle qui la suit, dans l'ordre des distances au soleil. AINSI DE SUITE: on tombera malheureusement bientôt sur des astres invisibles, à cause de leur immense distance au soleil, mais dont les orbites finiront, dans la suite des siècles, par être tracées avec une grande exactitude, au moyen de la théorie des inégalités séculaires!"

The law of the distances from the sun at which the planets succeed each other in our system is unknown. We may at present assume Bodi's law, or, still more simply, a geometrical progression, as an approximation to the truth sufficiently near for popular purposes, though signally failing in reference to Neptune. If with this foundation, we admit the distance assigned by Bessel to the star 61 Cygni, regarded as the nearest sun to ours, and suppose that the attraction of our sun prevails over one half of that distance, and acts in those remote spaces of the heavens by the same laws as within the limits with which we are better acquainted, there will be room

for ten new planets, and nearly the eleventh, as yet undiscovered, outside the orbit of Neptune. If it were ever safe to set bounds to the progress of science, we might venture to say, that there is no probability that man will ever command the instrumental power which will enable him to discover many of these remote bodies. It must be remembered, however, that it is but little more than a hundred years since the opinion was expressed by an English astronomer, that the power of the telescope had then (1729) nearly reached its limits. Since that time, twelve primary planets and eleven secondaries have been discovered. See Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. I. p. 178, and Memoirs of A. A. S., Third Series, Vol. III. Appendix, p. 282.

THE FAMINE IN IRELAND.*

I RISE, Mr Chairman, at your invitation, to unite with the gentlemen who have addressed the meeting with such ability, in recommending the passage of the resolutions. I scarce know in what manner to express myself on the occasion. The general topics of remark which suggest themselves have been exhausted by yourself and the gentlemen who have already spoken. I am unwilling-I may say I should be ashamed to think that any labored argument, or any studied words of persuasion, were necessary to convince an assembly of the citizens of Boston of the duty, or to awaken in them the desire, of speeding relief to the sufferers by famine in Ireland. If it be our only object to lay the most important facts of the case before those who have not particularly turned their attention to the subject, the task is not without difficulty. Since I received the invitation of the committee, the evening before the last, to attend this meeting, I have looked over the newspapers brought by the last steamer from Liverpool, and I find it hard to make a selection from the painful accounts with which their columns are filled. Mere general statistics do not answer the purpose. We read of the large proportion of the population deprived of their accustomed food; of the numbers who offer themselves for labor on the public works, beyond the utmost power of the official agents to employ them; of the numbers, still more wretched, who

Remarks made at a meeting for the relief of the Irish and Scotch, in Faneuil Hall, on the 17th of February, 1847, His Honor Josiah Quincy, Jun., mayor of Boston, in the chair.

knock at the doors of the almshouses, and find them closed; of the reputed numbers even of those who perish by starvation, or the diseases produced by scanty and unwholesome food. All these matters, stated in general terms, fail to bring the dreadful reality of things with sufficient vividness to our minds. If we seek to go further, and attempt to repeat the horrid details of striking cases of destitution and suffering, we are in danger of plunging into scenes too dreadful to be recited in public. "Of all the maladies," says the great master of English eloquence, to whom you, sir, have referred, "which beset and waylay the life of man, this plague of hunger comes the nearest to the human heart; and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is. But I find myself unable," he adds, "to manage it with decorum. These details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferer and the hearer; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and leave it to your general conceptions."

Mr Chairman, it is universally known that there are above two millions of people in Ireland who subsist almost exclusively on potatoes. It is scarcely necessary to say that, in the very best of times, and under prosperous circumstances, they live on the borders of starvation. What is looked upon as plenty by this part of the Irish population, would be regarded by us as little better than famine. There is nothing to fall back upon, in case of hard times; no retrenchment in the quantity, no reduction in the quality, no substitution of cheaper articles. They already live upon the smallest quantity of the cheapest food; and I have been told that it is a practice to eat the potatoes under-boiled, because in that condition they will lie longer in the stomach, and thus delude its craving emptiness. Two disastrous seasons have, in some parts of the country almost wholly, in others altogether, cut off the accustomed scant supply of this, the cheapest article of food; and the alarming question is, How is the want to be supplied? how are the horrors of general starvation to be

staved off? To which question I can only answer, Heaven knows. It must be, I fear, a more sagacious person than any in this assembly, who can return a satisfactory answer. The wisest heads in England and Ireland seem confounded at the extent of the evil. The government has contrived a very extensive scheme of employment on public works, which seems to have had but partial success; in fact, such is the infirmity of human counsel, to have been productive of some positive evils of a serious nature. At any rate, it is plain, that to employ two millions of people, or indeed any considerable portion of them, of a sudden, in an unaccustomed way, by public authority, must be a very dangerous experiment upon the regular march of industry; and if it were otherwise, what are the unemployed to do? Nay, what are the employed to do, with their pittance of wages, in districts. where there is little or no food; where what little there is can be bought only at what is called, with dreadful significance, a famine price?

-

The natural and necessary consequence of this state of things is that death - death by starvation - is now a common event is daily happening. The plague, having done its work on the lower animals, has fallen on man. The cow of the small farmer, all-important as she is to his family, has perished or been killed; the pig, the poultry of the cottier have in like manner died for want of food, or been killed to eke out a few days' miserable sustenance to their famished owner, the watch dog has been drowned, (and the poor peasant, who has perhaps no other living being he can call friend, had almost as lief drown a child,)—every wretched substitute for wholesome food, bark, roots, apple parings, turnip skins, have been exhausted, and now famine in all its horrors stalks through the land. To what actual extent the work of death had gone at the last accounts, it is not easy to say. There is unavoidable over-estimate in the first reports of such general calamities. I hold in my hand an extract from the proceedings of a large meeting of the nobility and gentry of Ireland, held at Dublin on the fourteenth of January, which is the latest authentic statement I