This engraving shows a group in an idealised room that is half laboratory and half library, apparently encompassing the whole range of knowledge understood in the phrase 'polite arts'. The professor holds a hydrogen-filled balloon by a string, there is a furnace in the foreground and globes and books in the background. To the left there is a man who may be the laboratory assistant and in the background and to the left there are three young men making up a suitably admiring audience.

This engraving is the frontispiece to an American edition of Daniel Jaudon, 'A Short System of Polite Learning, being an epitome of the arts and sciences for the use of the schools '. Versions of this text were published from 1789 in Britain, although Jaudon (1767-1826) was a native of Pennsylvania. This engraving by W. Ralph, active in Philadelphia from about 1794 to 1808, first appeared in the American edition of 1806.