Page:An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.djvu/72

 other. The members are not collected from among the students of some obscure seminary, or the wits of a metropolis, but chosen from all the literati of Europe, supported by the bounty, and ornamented by the productions of their royal founder. We can easily discern, how much such an institution excells any other now subsisting. One fundamental error among societies of this kind, is their addicting themselves to one branch of science, or some particular part of polite learning. Thus, in Germany, there are no where so many establishments of this nature; but as they generally profess the promotion of natural or medical knowlege, he who reads their Acta, will only find an obscure farrago of experiments, most frequently terminated by no resulting phænomena. To make experiments is, I own, the only way