powers of an individual to be able to construct. He had, ne vertheless, accomplished much in many parts of his comprehen sive design; but, after a slight indisposition, which produced no kind of uneasiness, he died suddenly, 15th Frimaire, year 9, (1801). He was, upon the whole, a retired and taciturn scholar. His life,' observes our biographer, like that of most other men of letters, may be comprised in two lines. What were his places of resort?-The libraries. Among whom did he live? His books. What did he ever produce?-Books. What did he ever say?—That which appears in his books.'

The list of printed works presented to the class within the period comprised by the volume itself, succeeds: they consist of about a hundred and thirty-all in French, at least with scarcely an exception, and for the most part but of trivial value.-We pass to the Memoirs, in their order.

I. Memoir relative to the Island of Madagascar, by M. Lescallier, associate-member.'-Upon this island the French have a small settlement, which has sometimes been entirely neglected by the government, and sometimes become an object of attention and favour. It is the endeavour of M. Lescallier, in the memoir before us, to re-awaken the vigilance of his countrymen to this island, and to represent it as a spot of much promise for a select colonisation. The soil he asserts to be fertile, and the climate propitious; while considerable riches might be easily acquired by the institution of a whale-fishery. Almost every preceding voyager, however, has given a different description of the country, which is commonly supposed to be so extremely marshy and insalubrious, as to defy the most pertinacious efforts of man to drain it, and render it healthy.-Yet the observations of M. Lescallier are entitled to attention, as proceeding from a voyager who has visited, and repeatedly traversed, the scene he describes. He was charged by the French government with a mission, which authorised him to visit all the French Oriental possessions, and concur in regulating and organising all their Indian factories and islands; and, in consequence of this authority, he directed his course to Madagascar, and landed at Foul-Point in the month of October 1792. In ascending the interior of the country, he takes an opportunity of contradicting an assertion of his countryman, the abbé Raynal, who has declared that the women alone here are employed in all occupations of labour; and of denying the existence either of Kimos or Albinos, the former being asserted to be a race of dwarfs inhabiting the middle region of the island, seldom exceeding three feet four inches in height, and the latter a species of white negroes. Both these phænomena have been long advanced by prior travelers, and have been alternately credited and disbelieved. Their existence, if we recollect aright, was first of all positively asserted by Commer

son: it was afterwards confirmed by Moldave; and, having been for a considerable period laughed at and rejected, was about ten years since again brought forward, and maintained as an undeniable fact by another of our author's countrymen, the abbế de Rochon, who pretended to testify the fact, as an eye-witness, for many years. We cannot enter into the dispute, but must incline to the negation before us.

II. Fragments of a Voyage to India, by the same.'-About the period just mentioned, our memoirist prosecuted his voyage to Pondicherry; and he gives, in the paper before us, an account of the appearances that principally impressed him during his residence in that quarter. He first describes a superb pagoda at Chalembra, about three leagues to the south of Porto-Novo, in the delineation of which we need not follow him. He next gives an account of a religious festival in the vicinity of the pagoda, in which the balindères, or dancing girls, attached to the hierarchy, perform the principal part. These are, selected indiscriminately from every cast of Hindus, and are consequently of every variety of colour: and armed with knives, daggers, and other pointed instruments, and surrounded with a most vociferous band of music, consisting of drums, tambourins, flutes, and trumpets, in the violent gesticulations of their ballets, they seem to rival the orgies of the Grecian Dea Mater, and the dithyrambic clamour of the Phrygian Curetes, from whom it is probable that the present enthusiastic cere-' mony has descended. The paper concludes with a short account of the representation of Indian comedies, and the holy feast of purification in the waters of the Ganges, an annual institution celebrated on the day of the full moon, in the month of March. Fifty thousand souls, at least,' says M. Lescallier, ⚫ were assembled together at this place (Tircanijeh, about two leagues to the west of Pondicherry): each bank of the river was covered to a very great distance in the vicinity of the temple, which is advantageously situated upon a small eminence near the right bank, named Ariancoupa. It affords all the appearance of a fair of flying shops, fruit-stalls, provisionstands, and other objects. Dancers, jugglers, pick-pockets, quacks, faquirs, performers of religious farces, beggars, all exert themselves to the utmost to draw forth the attention and the money of spectators and travellers. We beheld a number of little images of Indian gods, which the faquirs offered for sale to the devotion of the faithful; men who scarred their hands, their arms, their thighs, their chests, and various other parts of the body alternately with torches and burning coals, all dancing with forced and contorted gesticulations; others we saw walking on fire, and others still with their backs stretched on bundles of thorn; though I clearly perceived that these last had defended their backs by covering the thorns immediately in APP. Vol. 38.

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contact with themselves with linen-cloth; and perhaps the very thorns of this part of the bundle were broken off and removed. Petitions were, in the mean time, perpetually chaunted, the burden of whose song consisted in the demand of money. Among all these faquirs, the man who most astonished me was one who stood upon his head, with his feet in the air, and his legs extended in the form of the letter Y, still chaunting his petitions in this laborious and unnatural posture, with his throat wide open. I was more distressed at beholding him in this attitude, than he was in preserving it. The chief and essential object, however, of this assemblage of the followers of Bramah, is to plunge and purify themselves in the waters of the Ganges. In this river they bathe to a vast extent, united in distinct groups or families, with which a sight of the opposite banks, equally covered with the promiscuous multitude, forms a prospect infinitely varied, animated, and picturesque.'

III. Apology for Las-Casas, Bishop of Chiapa, by M. Gregoire.' The benevolent patron and protector of the Indians of Spanish America has too generally been conceived to have been the promoter, and by many others even the inventor, of the commerce in African slaves; and it is the object of M. Gregoire, in the memoir before us, to free him from so opprobrious a charge, and so contradictory a conduct. That Las Casas was not the father of this most infamous system is sufficiently apparent from the annals of Ortez de Zaniga, which verify the existence of companies formed at Lagos for the express purpose of prosecuting this lucrative traffic at Senegal and Cape Verd many years prior to the birth of Las Casas, which occurred in 1474; and the declaration of the same writer, that the Portuguese were the first who introduced it during the reign of the infant Don Henry; and that the earliest of these predatory expeditions of the Portuguese was headed by Alonzo Gonzales, who stole many of the natives of Guinea from their own coasts, and sold them to the Spaniards. And that Las Casas did not introduce the traffic into America, is clear, from the circumstance that all the best informed historians of Hispaniola, or St. Domingo as it is now called, Hargrave, Anderson, and Charlevoix, admit the existence of negro slaves in that island as early as 1508 and 1503, and Herrera as early as 1498, while not an individual of the accusers of Las Casas pretends that his project for the substitution of negroes was communicated prior to 1517. Having effectually cleared Las Casas from the imputation of havingbeen the founder of negro slavery, either generally or locally, M. Gregoire next investigates the arguments or facts by which he is said to have promoted it: and here he first impeaches the general credibility of Herrera, from whom every later historian, from Charlevoix to Robertson, has copied the accusation; and then asserts, that even the accusation itself has been commonly

advanced with far more strength of colouring in the different copies, than in the original. He next inquires, Is it not extraordinary that so detestable a charge should remain altogether unnoticed by every one of the various other authors, who at different epochs have written the life of Las Casas in a more or less detailed form? He observes, that the contemporaries of Las Casas, both friends and enemies, John de Solorzano, Davilla Padilla, Solis, Sandoval, Laet, and Torquemada, speak equally of him in their diverse histories and descriptions, but without accusing him that Gamilla, Thomas Gage, Alvarez Nunez, and many other authors contemporary with Herrera, speak of negroes, but without ever coupling them with Las Casas: and that, more especially in the celebrated conference, which, by order of the Spanish government, was held at Valladolid, in 1550, between Las Casas and his antagonist Sepulveda, in which the latter contended that it was just to make war against the Indians, in order to convert them; and the former refuted him upon the principles of toleration and liberty in favour of the entire race of mankind-principles which had obtained the solemn approbation of the universities of Alcala and SalamancaSepulveda, who was well versed in polemic warfare, would never have suffered such an inconsequent and contradictory defence to have fallen from the lips of Las Casas, without exposing its absurdity, if, in reality, he had ever expressed a wish to enslave the negroes, and submit them to the Americans. Finally, our memoirist proceeds to prove, that the doctrine and practice attributed to that benevolent ecclesiastic are expressly contradictory to his own writings. Here, however, we porceive some deficiency: it is true, the worthy prelate expresses the most vehement indignation against enslaving his favourite American Indians, and interdicts, from communion with his own church, every one who engaged in so unchristian a traffic; but he is silent upon the subject of African negroes; and we have much reason for believing that he distinguished between blacks and whites, and did not oppose the slave trade in the former, although he strenuously resisted it in the latter. Upon the whole. however, this, so far as it extends, is an able and a learned vindication of Las Casas from an imputation which has unjustly attached to his character.

IV. Memoir on the Code of Alaric, by M. Bouchard.' -The barbarous nations which, issuing from the west, dismembered the Roman empire, as, for example, the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Lombards, so far exhibited moderation in the midst of their conquests, as that they suffered the subjected Romans to be governed by the Roman law. It was hence that Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, son of Enric, and successor to him in the year

489 of the Christian æra, ordained, in 506, the arrangement of a code of Roman laws in favour of such Romans as had become his subjects. This compilation was an abridgement of the Gregorian, the Hermogenian, and Theodosian codes, of the institutes of Caius, the decisions of Paul, and the replies of Passianus. The code of Alaric, sometimes denominated Corpus Theodosianum, sometimes Lex Romana, and sometimes Breviarium Aniani, continued in use till the reign of Chindovind, who proscribed it by an express constitutional act in the seventh century. The object of M. Bouchard is to prove, first, that Anianus, whose breviary this celebrated code is occasionally denominated, by no means composed any part of it; and that, instead of having been the compiler, he was nothing more than the licentiate or superintendant of the copies that were made from the original work. In corroboration of which idea, he quotes, at some length, from the prolegomena of Jacobus Godfrey, who asserts, on the contrary, that this famous compilation was the work of count Gojaric-an idea, nevertheless, that our author opposes, as pointedly as the surmise that it was produced by Anianus. Leaving it, however, altogether uncertain by whom the work was edited, M. Bouchard proceeds to a more particular consideration of the various writings of which it consisted, the names of whose authors are sufficiently specificated in the compilation itself. Thus, at its very commencement, and before the commonitorium, we meet with the following assertion: In hoc opere continentur leges, sive species juris de Theodosiano et diversis libris selecte;' and, as a general clue to the expression diversis libris, we meet with the following title to the first law in the code:- De responsis prudentum. Ex Gregoriano, Hermogeniano, Caio, Papiano, et Paulo, quæ necessaria causis præsentium temporum videbantur elegimus.' Of the civilians here enumerated, Papianus and Paulus were appointed contemporary judges under the emperors Septimus Severus and Antoninus Caracalla. Of the two, Paulus appears to have been in higher repute, or at least in higher favour, having, in most cases of controverted opinion, carried the point against his collegue. Gregorius or Gregorianus for his name is written both ways-was contemporary with Constantine, and in his code collected the constitutions of the preceding emperors, from the time of Adrian. Shortly after the code of Gregorius appeared that of Hermogenianus, whose date is uncertain, but who is placed by our present memoirist, with much probability of truth, under Constantine, and the princes his sons: his code exhibits marks of particular attention to the constitutions of Dioclesian and his collegues, in investigating which, he appears to have been more minute than Gregorius. The civilian Caius or Gaius is said to have fou