physicien. Cf. note on Zadig, p

Page 107. 1. 9. Virgile : in the Fourth Géorgie.

1. 10. Swammerdam, a Dutch naturalist of the seventeenth centmy, the founder of the modem study of insects.

Réaumur : ' le Pline du xviii" siècle.' He is best knowu by the thermometer which he invented, but his principal studies are embodied in the Mémoires pour servir à V Histoire Naturelle des Insectes. He died in 1757.

1. 34. couverts de chapeaux. In a war that broke out in 1737 the Turks recovered Belgrade, which had been in Austrian hands since 1718.

Page 108. 1. 9. prétende un fétu. For prétende see note on Le monde comme il va, p. 12, 1. 16. Un fétu is used to emphasize the négative, like pas and point, both also properly nouns. Cf. ' Je no disais mot,' p. 117, 1. 36, and Mme de Sévigné, ' Je ne vois goutte dans votre cœur,' letter of March 11, 1671. See too note to p. 94, 1. 29.

1. 12. César. The Archduke of Austria was called ' César ' or Kaiser, because that title had survived after a long séries of historical changes. In 800 tho Frankish king, Charlemagne, who had conquered most of Italy, was elected emperor by the Romans on their rejection of the authority of Constantinople. The connexion of the Roman Empire with Gormany, thus begun.

was i-evived by Otto the Great, king of the Saxons, who was invited into Italy by Pope John XIÏ and crowned emperor in 962. From that time forward it may be said that the Roman Empire was a gradually climinishing part of Germany. Most of the Italian possessions of the empire were lost in 1733. The German kings originally, and therefore later the emperors, were elected, and from the fifteenth century, to strengthen the position of the emperor, it was the custom to elect him from the powerful house of Austria. In 1804, when Buonaparte made himself emperor of the French, the ' Emperor ' Francis took the title of Hereditary Emperor of Austria, and in 1806 the old title was iinally dropped.

1. 26. ce n'est pas eux followed by ce sont ces barbares seems to show that it is chiefly the sound that causes one of thèse forms to be preferred to the other.

Page 109. 1. 8. la Canicule, Sirius. Cf. note to p. 93, 1. 2. les Gémeaux, Gemini, ' the Twins,' the two conspicuous stars Castor and Pollux.

1. 15. neuf cents fois. Distilled water is 825 times as heavy as air, and gold therefore about 15,000 times.

1. 28. Descartes, René (1596-1650), the French mathematician and philosopher, ' once,' says IMatthew Arnold, ' was in the thoughts of eveiybody who tried to think.' He was the first to use modem methods of scientific thinking. Starting from his famous ' Cogito, ergo sum ', he infers the existence of a thinking substance, mind, closely connected with a body, not thinking, and therefore différent. From this he deduces the existence of matter with the property of extension in tlu-ee dimensions, to which Voltaire refers below.

Malebranche, an Oratorian, ' who wrote in the interests of Ihcology ' (Mahafl'y), developed some of Descartes' doctrines in tho direction of a mysticism burlesqued in p. 110,11. 25-9. 'L'esprit devient plus pur,' he says, ' plus lumineux, plus fort et plus étendu à proportion que s'augmente l'union qu'elle a avec Dieu, parce que c'est elle qui fait toute sa perfection.' — De la recherche de la vérité, préface.