Whatever fluid was now offered to him passed the œsophagus with a rattling sound, as often happens with dying people; and there were all the signs of death being close at hand.

I wished to stay with him till all was over; and, as I had been amongst the nearest witnesses of his life, to be witness also of his departure; and, therefore, I never quitted him, except when I was called off for a few minutes to attend some private business. The whole of this night I spent at his bedside. Though he had passed the day in a state of insensibility, yet in the evening he made intelligible signs that he wished to have his bed put in order; he was therefore lifted out in our arms, and the bedclothes and pillows being hastily arranged, he was carried back again. He did not sleep; and a spoonful of liquid, which was sometimes put to his lips, he usually pushed aside; but about one o'clock in the night he himself made a movement towards the spoon, from which I collected that he was thirsty; and I gave him a small quantity of wine and water sweetened; but the muscles of his mouth had not strength enough to retain it; so that, to prevent its flowing back, he raised his hand to his lips, until with a rattling sound it was swallowed. He seemed to wish for more; and I continued to give him more, until he said, in a way that I was just able to understand, It is enough."* And these were his last words. It is enough! Sufficit! Mighty and symbolic words! At intervals he pushed away the bedclothes, and exposed his

"It is enough :"-The cup of life, the cup of suffering, is drained. For those who watch, as did the Greek and the Roman, the deep meanings that oftentimes hide themselves (without design and without consciousness on the part of the utterer) in trivial phrases, this final utterance would have seemed intensely symbolic.

person; I constantly restored the clothes to their situation, and on one of these occasions I found that the whole body and extremities were already growing cold, and the pulse intermitting.

At a quarter after three o'clock on Sunday morning, February 12, 1804, Kant stretched himself out as if taking up a position for his final act, and settled into the precise posture which he preserved to the moment of death. The pulse was now no longer perceptible to the touch in his hands, feet, or neck. I tried every part where a pulse beats, and found none but in the left hip, where it continued to beat with violence, but often intermitted.

About ten o'clock in the forenoon he suffered a remarkable change; his eye was rigid, and his face and lips became discoloured by a cadaverous pallor. Still, such was the intensity of his constitutional habits, that no trace appeared of the cold sweat which naturally accompanies the last mortal agony.

It was near eleven o'clock when the moment of dissolution approached. His sister was standing at the foot of the bed, his sister's son at the head. I, for the purpose of still observing the fluctuations in the pulse, was kneeling at the bedside; and I called his servant to come and witness the death of his good master. The last agony was now advancing to its close, if agony it could be called, where there seemed to be no struggle. And precisely at this moment, his distinguished friend Mr R. R. V., whom I had summoned by a messenger, entered the room. First of all, the breath grew feebler; then it missed its regularity of return; then it wholly intermitted, and the upper lip was slightly convulsed; after this there followed one feeble respiration or sigh; and after that no more; but the pulse still beat for a few seconds-slower and

fainter, slower and fainter, till it ceased altogether; the mechanism stopped; the last motion was at an end; and exactly at that moment the clock struck eleven.

Soon after his death the head of Kant was shaved; and, under the direction of Professor Knorr, a plaster cast was taken, not a masque merely, but a cast of the whole head, designed (I believe) to enrich the craniological collection. of Dr Gall.

The corpse being laid out and properly attired, immense numbers of people in every rank, from the highest to the lowest, flocked to see it. Everybody was anxious to avail himself of the last opportunity he would have for entitling himself to say, "I too have seen Kant." This went on for many days, during which, from morning to night, the house was thronged with the public. Great was the astonishment of all people at the meagreness of Kant's appearance; and it was universally agreed that a corpse so wasted and fleshless had never been beheld. His head rested upon the same cushion on which once the gentlemen of the university had presented an address to him; and I thought that I could not apply it to a more honourable purpose than by placing it in the coffin, as the final pillow of that immortal head.

Upon the style and mode of his funeral, Kant had expressed his wishes in earlier years by a special memorandum. He there desired that it should take place early in the morning, with as little noise and disturbance as possible, and attended only by a few of his most intimate friends. Happening to meet with this memorandum, whilst I was engaged at his request in arranging his papers, I very frankly gave him my opinion, that such an injunction would lay me, as the executor of his will, under

great embarrassments; for that circumstances might very probably arise under which it would be next to impossible

to carry it into effect. Upon this Kant tore the paper,

and left the whole to my own discretion. The fact was, I foresaw that the students of the university would never allow themselves to be robbed of this occasion for expressing their veneration by a public funeral. The event showed that I was right; for a funeral such as Kant's, one so solemn and so magnificent, the city of Königsberg has never witnessed before or since. The public journals, and separate reports in pamphlets, &c., have given so minute an account of its details, that I shall here notice only the heads of the ceremony.

On the 28th of February, at two o'clock in the afternoon, all the dignitaries of church and state, not only those resident in Königsberg, but from the remotest parts of Prussia, assembled in the church of the castle. Hence they were escorted by the whole body of the university, splendidly dressed for the occasion, and by many military officers of rank, with whom Kant had always been a great favourite, to the house of the deceased professor; from which the corpse was carried by torchlight, the bells of every church in Königsberg tolling, to the cathedral, which was lit up by innumerable wax-lights. A never-ending train of people followed it on foot. In the cathedral, after the usual burial rites, accompanied with every possible expression of national veneration to the deceased, there was a grand musical service, most admirably performed; at the close of which, Kant's mortal remains were lowered into the academic vault; and there he now rests among the patriarchs of the university. PEACE BE TO HIS DUST; AND TO HIS MEMORY EVERLASTING HONOUR!

SYSTEM OF THE HEAVENS

AS REVEALED BY LORD ROSSE'S TELESCOPES.*

SEVERAL years ago, some person or other (in fact, I believe it was myself) published a paper from the German of Kant, on a very interesting question; viz., the age of our own little Earth. Those who have never seen that paper-a class of unfortunate people whom I suspect to form the majority in our present perverse generation-will be likely to misconceive its object. Kant's purpose was, not to ascertain how many years the Earth had lived: no such barren conundrum occupied him. For, had there even been any means of coercing the Earth into an honest answer on such a delicate point, which the Sicilian canon,

Thoughts on Some Important Points relating to the System of the World. By J. P. Nichol, LL.D., Professor of Astronomy in the University of Glasgow. In obedience to the facts of the case, I have indicated this particular work of my friend Professor Nichol's as having furnished-because in some imperfect sense it really did furnish—the text to which this little paper refers, and about which it may be said to hover. But it would be doing great injustice to the learned professor, if I should authorise the reader to accept so desultory a paper as an adequate and formal review of that work: and it would be doing some injustice to myself, if I were supposed to have ever designed it for discharging such a function. Grave and scientific reviews of that book were sure to be written in useless abundance. And I, for my own part, if otherwise qualified for writing such a review, should have felt no ambition for swelling a catalogue already certain of being