82 INTRODUCTION. 



the Muscadins of Paris in a popular work as wild and 

 amusing as a fairy tale, he could safely take the liberty, 

 and he did take it very freely, of greatly exaggerating the 

 marvellous and adding fresh fictions to the untrue. And 

 in preparing them for his transmutative theory of a marine 

 into a terrestrial vegetation, he set himself, in accordance 

 Avith his general character, to show that really the transmu- 

 tation did not amount to much. ' I know you have resided 

 a long time,' his Indian Philosopher is made to say, ' at 

 Marseilles. Xow you can bear me witness that the fisher- 

 men there daily find in their nets, among their fish, plants 

 of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them, and 

 though these fruits are not so large and so well nourished 

 as those of our earth, yet the species of these plants is in 

 no other respect dubious. They there find clusters of white 

 and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, 

 apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers. AYhen in that city, I 

 saw in the cabinet of a curious gentleman a prodigious 

 number of those sea-productions of difi'erent qualities, espe- 

 cially of rose-trees, which had their roses very red when 

 they came out of the sea. I was then presented with a 

 cluster of black sea-grapes. It was at the time of the 

 vintage, and there were two grapes perfectly ripe.' Now 



