tourné: tourner = Mer et venir en divers sens

1. 21. toise : an ancient measuro of length equal to L9;") mètres, a 'fathom'. Hero again tho hoight of the imaginary inhabitant is greatly exaggerated.

1. 24. Lulli, Jean-Baptiste, tho director of the Académie de Musique under Louis XIV, vvas the founder of the French school of music which fell into disfavour early in tho eighteenth century under the influence of tho Italian style of Porpora and Pergolesi. Voltaire says elsewhere : ' La musique française est demeurée dans une simplicité qui n'est plus au goût d'aucune nation.' — Siècle de Louis XIV, c. xxxii. Addison had made the same observation in other words : ' The French music is now perfect in its kind ; and when you say it is not so good as the Italian, you only mean that it does not please you as vvell, for there is scaree a Frenchman who would not wonder to hear you give the Italian such a préférence.'— ^/Spectator, 29.

1. 29. secrétaire de V Académie. This is a référence to Fontenelle, who was still living, an old man of ninety-five. He was for fortythree years secretary of the Académie des Sciences, founded in 1666 to study questions of mathematics, physics, &c. The foUowing chapter satirizes his method of popularizing scientific exposition by the use of an easy and picturesque style. La Bruyère had said of him fifty years before : ' C'est un homme composé du pédant et du précieux, fait pour être admiré de la bourgeoisie et de la province.' — Les Caractères, v.

Page 96. 1. 25. cinq lunes. Eight are now known.

Page 97. 1. 2. je n'en ai vu aucuns. This use of aucuns, common in the French of tho seventeenth century, is one of the tolérances permitted in 1900. See note to p. 76, 1. 12.

1. 17. grandes révolutions. Saturn accomplishes its révolution in about twenty-nine and a half years of our time.

Page 98. 1.10. étendue, 'magnitude,' or 'extension.' Cf. 1. 33, ' les êtres étendus.'

1. 24. tirer sur = avoir quelque rapport, quelque ressemblance. 1. 34. ceux qui se pénètrent refers to V impénétrabilité in 1. 11.

Page 99. 1. 7. un illustre habitant : the Dutch astronomer Christian Huyghens, who in 1655 first demonstrated the existence of the ' ring ' of Saturn. It has since beon found that there are really three rings, consisting probably of small météorites.

1. 15. actuellement, not ' actually.' See note on Memnon, p. 91, 1. 30.

inquisiteurs. See note on mwphti, p. 94, 1. 20.

1. 21. Moréri, a liistorical and geographical dictiunaiy, tii.st issued in 1673, and revised at intervais.

1. 26. detix lunes. This wonderful guess was confirmed in 1877 by the discoveiy of two small satellites, a few miles in dianieter.