the Jansenists, to engrave a print of Jesus Christ dressed as a Jesuit. The Jansenists, on the other hand, in order to give a satisfactory proof that Jesus Christ had not assumed the habit of a Jesuit, filled Paris with convulsions, and attracted great crowds of people to witness them. The counsellor of parliament, Carré de Montgeron, went to present to the king a quarto collection of all these miracles, attested by a thousand witnesses. He was very properly shut up in a chateau, where attempts were made to restore his senses by regimen; but truth always prevails over per→ secution, and the miracles lasted for thirty years together, without interruption. Sister Rose, sister Illuminée, and the sisters Promise and Comfitte, were scourged with great energy, without, however, exhibiting any appearance of the whipping next day. They were bastinadoed on their stomachs without injury, and placed before a large fire, but being defended by certain pomades and preparations, were not burnt. At length, as every art is constantly advancing towards perfection, their persecutors concluded with actually thrusting swords through their chairs, and with crucifying them. A famous schoolmaster had also the benefit of crucifixion; all which was done to convince the world that a certain bull was ridiculous, a fact that might have been easily proved without so much trouble. However, Jesuits and Jansenists, all united against the "Spirit of Laws," and against . . . and against... and against. and ... And after all this, we dare to ridicule Laplanders, Samoiedes, and Negroes!

...

CORN.*

THEY must be sceptics indeed who doubt that pain comes from panis. But to make bread we must have corn. The Gauls had corn in the time of Cæsar:

*The new light thrown upon the subject of corn by the political economists, and the progress of general information, in a great degree supersede the information and remarks of Voltaire; so that little more is retained of this article, than a few facts and pleasantries, conveyed in his own very peculiar vein.-T.

but whence did they take the word blé ? It is pretended that it is from bladum, a word employed in the barba rous Latin of the middle age by the chancellor Desvignes, or de Erneis, whose eyes, it is said, were torn out by order of the emperor Frederick II.

But the Latin words of these barbarous ages were only ancient Celtic or Teutonic words Latinized. Bla dum then comes from our blead, and not our blead from bladum. The Italians call it bioda, and the countries in which the ancient Roman language is preserved still say blia.

This knowledge is not infinitely useful; but we are curious to know where the Gauls and, Teutones found corn to sow? We are told that the Tyrians brought it into Spain, the Spaniards into Gaul, and the Gauls into Germany. And where did the Tyrians get this corn? Probably from the Greeks, in exchange for their alphabet.

Who made this present to the Greeks? It was the goddess Ceres, without doubt; and having ascended to Ceres, we can scarcely go any higher. Ceres must have descended from heaven expressly to give us wheat, rye, and barley.

However, as the credit of Ceres, who gave corn to the Greeks, and that of Ishet or Isis, who gratified the Egyptians with it, are at present very much decayed, we may still be said to remain in uncertainty as to the origin of corn.

Sanchoniathon tells us that Dagon or Dagan, one of the grandsons of Thaut, had the superintendence of the corn in Phoenicia. Now his Thaut was near the time of our Jared; from which it appears that corn is very ancient, and that it is of the same antiquity as grass. Perhaps this Dagon was the first who made bread; but that is not demonstrated.

What a strange thing that we should know positively that we are obliged to Noah for wine, and that we do not know to whom we owe the invention of bread. And what is still more strange, we are still so ungrateful to Noah, that while we have more than two thousand

songs in honour of Bacchus, we scarcely sing one in honour of our benefactor Noah.

A Jew assured me that corn came without cultiva, tion in Mesopotamia, as apples, wild pears, chesnuts, and medlars, in the west. It is as well to believe him, until we are sure of the contrary; for it is necessary that corn should grow spontaneously somewhere. It has become the ordinary and indispensable nourish ment in the finest climates, and in all the north.

The great philosophers whose talents we estimate sa highly, and whose systems we do not follow, have pre tended, in the natural history of the dog (page 195) that men created corn; and that our ancestors, by means of sowing tares and cow-grass together, changed them into wheat, As these philosophers are not of our opinion on shells, they will permit us to differ from them on corn, We do not think that tulips could ever have been produced from jasmine. We find that the germ of corn is quite different from that of tares, and we do not believe in any transmutation. When it shall be proved to us, we will retract.

We have seen, in the article BREAD-TREE, that in three quarters of the earth bread is not eaten. It is pretended that the Ethiopians laughed at the Egyptians, who lived on bread. But since corn is our chief nourishment, it has become one of the greatest objects of commerce and politics. So much has been written on this subject, that if a labourer sowed as many pounds of wheat as we have volumes on this commodity, he might expect a more ample harvest, and become richer than those who, in their painted and gilded saloons, are ignorant of the excess of his oppression and misery.

Egypt became the best country in the world for wheat, when, after several ages, which it is difficult to reckon exactly, the inhabitants found the secret of rendering a destructive river, which had always inundated the country, and was only useful to the rats, insects, reptiles, and crocodiles of Egypt, serviceable to the fecundity of the soil. Its waters, mixed with a black mud, were neither useful to quench the thirst of the

inhabitants, nor for ablution. It must have taken immense time and a prodigious labour to subdue the river, to divide it into canals, to found towns on lands formerly moveable, and to change the caverns of the rocks into vast buildings.

All this is more astonishing than the pyramids; for being accomplished, behold a people sure of the best corn in the world, without the necessity of labour! It is the inhabitant of this country who raises and fattens poultry superior to that of Caux, who is habited in the finest linen in the most temperate climate, and who has none of the real wants of other people.

Towards the year 1750, the French nation, surfeited with tragedies, comedies, operas, romances, and romantic histories-with moral reflections still more romantic, and with theological disputes on grace and on convulsionaries, began to reason upon corn. They even forgot the vine, in treating of wheat and rye. Useful things were written on agriculture, and every body read them except the labourers. The good people imagined, as they walked out of the comic opera, that France had a prodigious quantity of corn to sell, and the cry of the nation at last obtained of the government, in 1764, the liberty of exportation.

Accordingly they exported. The result was exactly what it had been in the time of Henry IV. they sold a little too much, and a barren year succeeding, Mademoiselle Bernard * was. obliged, for the second time, to sell her necklace to get linen and chemises. Now the complainants passed from one extreme to the other and exclaimed against the exportation that they had so recently demanded, which shows how difficult it is to please all the world and his wife.

Able and well-meaning people, without interest, have written with as much sagacity as courage, in favour of the unlimited liberty of the commerce in grain. Others of as much mind, and with equally pure views, have written in the idea of limiting this liberty; and the Neapolitan abbé Gagliani amused the French nation on the expor

A celebrated milliner.

tation of corn, by finding out the secret of making, even in French, dialogues as amusing as our best romances, and as instructive as our good serious books. If this work did not diminish the price of bread, it gave great pleasure to the nation, which was what it valued most. The partisans of unlimited exportation answered him smartly. The result was, that the readers no longer knew where they were, and the greater part took to reading romances, expecting that the three or four following years of abundance would enable them to judge. The ladies were no longer able to distinguish wheat from rye, while honest devotees continued to believe, that grain must lie and rot in the ground, in order to spring up again.

COUNCILS.*

Meetings of Ecclesiastics, called together to resolve Doubts or Questions on Points of Faith or Discipline.

THE use of councils was not unknown to the followers of the ancient religion of Zerdusht, whom we call Zoroaster.† About the year 200 of our era, Ardeshir Babecan, king of Persia, called together forty thousand priests, to consult them touching some of his doubts about paradise and hell, which they call the gehen a term adopted by the Jews during their captivity at Babylon, as they did the names of the angels and of the months. Erdoviraph, the most celebrated of the magi, having drunk three glasses of a soporific wine, had an extasy which lasted seven days and seven nights, during which his soul was transported to God. When the paroxysm was over, he re-assured the faith of the king, by relating to

* The subject matter of each of these three sections of the article COUNCILS being precisely the same, we think it necessary once more to observe, that the different sections which compose each article being, in almost every instance, taken from works published separately, cannot but contain some repetitions: but as the tone of each article, the reflections, or the manner of introducing them, is almost always different, we have thought proper the preserve each entire.-French Editor's Note. + Hyde-Religion of the Persians, chap. xxi.