cré/î^ = autorité ; cf. note on p

brahmanes, also hraclimanes : the highest or pricstly caste in the ancicnt religious System of India.

1. 19. le bûcher du veuvage : what is know n in England as sati or suttee ; from the Sanscrit sati, ' a virtuous wife.' It was abolished by Lord William Bentinck in 1829.

Page 48. 1. 29. au seul Zadig. This position of the adjective is not uncommon in the eighteenth century. Cf. ' des peuples qui, méprisant tous les autres, font aux seuls Français l'honneur de les haïr.' — Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes, 78. ' C'est une aventure dont le seul récit est attendrissant.' — Mabivaux, Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard, iii. 5.

1. 33. Bassora, or Basra, a great commercial town on the right

bank of tlie .Shat-el-Arab, about ten miles from the present port of that name.

Page 49. 1. 2. sensible. See note on p. 36, 1. lô.

1. 6. Cathay : a name given in the Middie Ages to the northern part of China. Its chief town, Cambalu (see p. 50, 1. 33) or Cambaluc, is now Peldn.

1. 36. un bœuf, i. e. Apis, the sacred buU (cf. p. 50, 1. 10), the incarnation of the god Phthah, ' the créative hand,' kept at Memphis and solemnly paraded for adoration.

Page 50. 1. 6. Brama, or Brahma (cf. p. 47, 1. 15), is the first person of the Brahman Trinity, the Creator, usually represented by a figure with four heads and four hands. ' Too abstract an idea to be a popular god. Vishnu, the second person of the Trinity, was a more usefulandfriendlydeity.' — Sir W. Hunter.

1. 9. plaisant. The meaning varies between pleasing, amusing, odd, and ridiculous. Cf. p. 55, 1. 17, ' voilà une plaisante façon de choisir un receveur de mes finances' ; p. 71, 1. 10: 'Belle Missouf, vous êtes beaucoup plus plaisante que moi ' ; and Memnon, p. 90, 1. 6: 'Je vous trouve un plaisant borgne.'

1. 14. Le jeu des échecs is thought to hâve been invented in India.

1. 16. Oannès. A Chaldean legend says that, 691,200 years before the Déluge, Eâ-Han, a divine man-fish, came up out of the Persian Gulf and introduced the arts of civilization among men.

1. 36. le Li ou le Tien : mots chinois qui signifient proprement : li, la lumière naturelle, la raison, et tien, le ciel ; et qui signifient aussi Dieu. (Note de Voltaire.)

Page 51. 1. 5. en Chaldée. The advanced civihzation of Chaldea was not properly known in Voltaire's time. Some of the existing ' bricks ' with astronomical calculations are thought to belong to the thirty-eighth century B.c.

1. 8. le Chaos est le père de tout. 'The belicf that the world «as rrcated by a Suprême Power, though very old and w idely spread in the East, was never congenial to the Greeks. Their tendency was to think of the world, not as mode by a Creator, but as barn out of pre-existing éléments.' — Jebb.

1. 13. Teutath, or Teutatès, the god from whom the CJauls claimed dcscent. It is thought to hâve teen the deity whom Caesar calls Mercury (de Bell. Gall. vi. 17).

le gui. The vénération with which this plant was rogarded by the Celtic tribcs is well known.

I. 18. mangé des liommes. This scems to be a Voltairean cxaggeration. Horodotus, howovor, says : ' Tho Scythian

Koldier drinks tho blofxl of tho tirât mau he overthrows in battle ' {Hist. iv. 64) ; and Lucan :

Et quibuH immitis placatur .sanguine diro • Teutates horrcnsqiie feris altaribus Esus

(Phars. i. 444-5)

apparently refers to the human «acrifices described by Caesar, de Bell. Gall. vi. 16 'Alii immani magnitudine simulacra habent, quorum contexta viminibus membra vivis hominibus complent ; quibus succensis circumventi flamma oxanimantui" homines.'

1. 21. apprendre à vivre à quelqu'un = le comger, le punir de ses torts.