Aug. 21. 1852.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



181 



I suspect it was first generally adopted, or at least 

 was made popular, by the Commonwealth men. 



E.S.T.T. 



MEMOIRES d'uNE CONTEMPORAINE. 



(Vol. vi., p. 75.) 

 The question of Uneda (Philadelphia) is worth 

 answering, for the sake of historical truth, though 

 ihe person and the book he inquires after are in 

 themselves utterly contemptible. The woman was 

 an ave7ituriere of the most profligate class : it is 

 not very clear what her real name was; that which 

 she first assumed, Van-Aylde-Yonghe, was the 

 maiden name of her mother, a Dutch woman. She 

 seems afterwards to have assumed, in the course 

 of her trade as a professed courtesan, several tem- 



Sorary names ; amongst others, those of Ney and 

 loi-eau, whom she lived with ; but at last she 

 settled down under that of Ida de St. Elme. 

 Having been born in 1778, her personal stock in 

 trade must have deteriorated considerably by the 

 time of the Restoration ; and at the age of forty- 

 six (1824 ?) she attempted to become an authoress, 

 but without success. She could find no bookseller 

 to ])rint a novel which, with the usual tact and 

 good sense of such persons, she chose to call 

 Coriime. She now fell into such misery as to 

 have, she says, attempted suicide. This seems, 

 like all her anecdotes, very apocryphal ; but she 

 was received into some kind of charitable asylum. 

 About this time the appetite for scandalous me- 

 moirs was in full force in Pai'is, and she thought 

 of directing her authorship into that line. With 

 the assistance of a hack litterateur of the name of 

 Malitourne, and under the patronage of Lavocat 

 the bookseller, she produced the voluminous and 

 indecent fat?'as, in eight volumes octavo, which 

 Uneda mentions. Some scandalous and licentious 

 anecdotes of her own life may perhaps be true, 

 and nothing can equal her effrontery in telling 

 them : but the work altogether is a profligate 

 catchpenny, of no authority or value whatsoever, 

 and is, I believe, now selling almost as waste paper. 



C 



FISHING BY ELECTRICITY. 



(Vol. vi., p. 53.) 



The following paragraph, from The West of 

 England Conservative for July 28, 1852, will 

 perhaps interest your correspondent Llewillah. 



" We alluded several weeks since, to certain experi- 

 ments by Mr. E. A. Heineken, of Bremen, to test the 

 applicability of electricity as a means of facilitating the 

 capture of whales. Mr. Heineken, who is now in the 

 United States, has recently received intelligence from 

 Bremen which is of much interest, relating to the suc- 

 cess of this invention, as practically tested on board 

 the Bremen whale-ship 'Averick Heineken,' Captain 



Georken. The • Averick Heineken' left the river 

 Weser last July, for the Pacific Ocean, having on 

 board three rotation machines of various sizes, in order 

 to ascertain the degree of power necessary to secure 

 sperm or right whales ; one machine containing one 

 magnet, another four, and another fourteen. Captain 

 Georken, in a letter dated New Zealand, Dec. 13, 1851, 

 writes as follows: — 'The first experiment we made 

 with the new invention was upon a shark, applying the 

 electricity from the machine with one magnet. The 

 fish, after being struck, instantly turned over on its 

 side, and after we had poured in upon him a stream of 

 electricity for a few moments by turning the handle of 

 the machine, the shark became stiff as a piece of wood. 

 We next fell in with a black fish. As soon as the 

 whale-iron was thrown into him, and the machine 

 handle turned, the fish began to sink. The operator 

 then ceased turning the machine, and the fish imme- 

 diately rose; when the machine was again set in mo- 

 tion, upon which the fish lay stiff on the surface of the 

 water, and was taken alongside of the ship. At this 

 time we made use of tlie four-magnet machine. We 

 saw sperm and other whales, and lowered our boats, 

 but were unsuccessful in getting fast to them, as they 

 disappeared on our approaching them ; while at all 

 other times the weather was too boisterous to permit 

 us to lower our boats. Thus we had but one chance 

 to try the experiment upon a whale, which was made 

 with the four-magnet machine. The whale, upon being 

 struck, made one dash onward, then turned on his side, 

 and was rendered perfectly powerless. Although 1 

 have, as yet, not been fortunate enough to test the 

 invention in more instances, I have the fullest confi- 

 dence in the same, and doubt not to be able to report 

 the most astonishing results on my return from the 

 Arctic seas, where 1 am now bound.' " 



W. Fraseii. 



MATDRIN LAURENT. 



(Vol. vi., pp. 11.111.) 



Your correspondent A. N. will find in the His- 

 toire de Jacobinism, by the Abbe Barruel, that 

 Maturin Laurent was a monk that Marc Michel, 

 the celebrated bookseller in Amsterdam, kept in 

 his pay, and who furnished him with many works 

 of a similar character to Le Compa-e Mathieu. As 

 your correspondent truly says, " it is a somewhat 

 learned and not altogether undull" book ; but " it 

 is not an imitation of the manner of Rabelais." It 

 is a philosophical romance, in which many of the 

 most curious speculations of the human mind are 

 argued with great ability. Two lads leave the 

 Je'sults' College at La Fleche, are joined by a 

 Spaniard and Englishman, a renegade priest, and 

 one or two others, who travel together over a great 

 part of Europe, and indulge with great freedom on 

 a great variety of topics. The story serves for a 

 peg to hang their philosophy on. Voltaire repu- 

 diates being the author. The style is indeed un- 

 like that of Voltaire, but equally brilliant; and the 

 language is very pure. The copy of Le Compere 



