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* The Romish Rituals direct the baptizing of the child, in cases of danger, before it is born;—but upon this proviso, That some part or other of the child’s body be seen by the baptizer:——But the Doctors of the Sorbonne, by a deliberation held amongst them, April 10, 1733,—have enlarged the powers of the midwives, by determining, That tho’ no part of the child’s body should appear,——that baptism shall, nevertheless, be administered to it by injection,—par le moyen d’ une petite Canulle.—Anglicé,3 a squirt.——’tis very strange that St. Thomas Aquinas,4 who had so good a mechanical head, both for tying and untying the knots of school-divinity,—should, after so much pains bestowed upon this,—give up the point at last, as a second La chose impossible;—“Infantes in maternis uteris existentes (quoth St Thomas) baptizari possunt nullo modo.”—O Thomas! Thomas!

If the reader has the curiosity to see the question upon baptism, by injection, as presented to the Doctors of the Sorbonne,—with their consultation thereupon, it is as follows.

*Vide Deventer,6 Paris Edit. 4to, 1734. p. 366.

CHAP. XXI

———I wonder what’s all that noise, and running backwards and forwards for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing himself, after an hour and a half’s silence, to my uncle Toby,——who you must know, was sitting on the opposite side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time, in mute contemplation of a new pair of black-plush-breeches which he had got on;—What can they be doing brother? quoth my father,—we can scarce hear ourselves talk.

I think, replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,——I think, says he:——But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby’s sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the out-lines of which I shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father will go on as well again.

—Pray what was that man’s name,—for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,——who first made the observation, “That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?” Whoever he was, ’twas a just and good observation in him.----But the corollary drawn from it, namely, “That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical1 characters;”—that was not his;----it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him:—Then again,—that this copious store-house of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent;——that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of king William’s reign,—when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces,2 (if I mistake not) most fortunately hit upon it. Indeed towards the latter end of queen Anne, the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;3—but the discovery was not his.—Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters,——doth thereby, in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,–that observation is my own;–and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.

Thus,—thus my fellow labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical) have, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that Aκμ4 of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the