For reasons that will appear, certain of those Apocalyptic Utterances by Perpetual President Maupertuis have since got a new interest, and one has actually a kind of wish to read the IPSISSIMA VERBA of them, at this date! But in La Beaumelle (his modern Editor lying fast asleep throughout) there is no vestige of help.

Nay Maupertuis's own Book, [--OEuvres de Maupertuis,--Lyon, 1756, 4 vols.

4to.] luxurious cream-paper Quartos, or Octaves made four-square by margin,--which you buy for these and the cognate objects,--proves altogether worthless to you.

The Maupertuis Quartos are not readable for their own sake (solemnly emphatic statement of what you already know; concentrated struggle to get on wing, and failure by so narrow a miss; struggle which gets only on tiptoe, and won't cease wriggling and flapping); and then (to your horror) they prove to be carefully cleaned of all the Maupertuis-VOLTAIRE matter;--edition being SUBSEQUENT to that world-famous explosion.

CAVEAT EMPTOR .-- Our Excerpt proceeds:-- "Industrious Konig, like other mathematical people, has been listening to these Oracles on the 'Law of Minimum,' by the Perpetual President; and grieves to find, after study, That said Law does not quite hold; that in fact it is, like Descartes's old key or general door, worth little or nothing; as Leibnitz long ago seems to have transiently recognized.