VOL. XLI.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 3J)(| 



reading on this occasion. Hardly any writer has been more copious on the 

 subject, or has given better hints for clearing up many passages of sacred and 

 profance story. 



In his third book he has treated at large on the dynasties of Egypt, and the 

 shepherd kings who reigned there : both of them, perhaps, the darkest spots 

 in the whole face of antiquity. He has taken great pains to fix the epochs of 

 the kings of Sicyon, Sidon and Tyre, of Arabia, Assyria, Lydia, of the Medes 

 and Babylonians ; concerning all which, he has laid together the most remark- 

 able testimonies of the ancients. At length he comes to his favourite point, 

 the Chinese history, and gives, as he says, a complete list of their kings, 

 from the flood down to the present monarch of that empire, and shows that 

 the chronology of the Chinese, may be made pretty nearly consistent with the 

 true chronology of the Old Testament. 



And for this part of the work the author seems well fitted, being skilled, as 

 he tells us in the preface, in the learned characters of that country, which 

 he has studied for near 20 years, and has for some time taught in the royal 

 college at Paris ; and having composed 5 dictionaries and a grammar, of that 

 language, with a translation, almost intire, of the geography of Tamim, which 

 contains no less than the whole history of that empire : on which occasion he 

 applies to himself, and the progress he has made in the Chinese learning, those 

 expressive verses of Virgil in his 6th book of the ^neid : 



— — ^^— Pauci, quos aequus amavit 



Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus, 



Dii geniti, potuere. 



On the Scurvy-Grass that grows in Greenland. By Mr. David Nicholson, Sur- 

 geon. N°45(), p. 317. 



Mr. N. communicates this as matter of truth, and not hypothetic, viz. that 

 the scurvy-grass in Greenland, equally the same with ours in England, as to 

 the figure of the plant, and all its appearance to the eye, changes its nature 

 much, as it approaches the sun ; for in that climate, its principal quality, the 

 volatile salt, is neither pungent nor perceivable ; but to the taste, the whole 

 plant is quite as insipid as the colewort or beet. Mr. N. preserved some plants 

 with their natural earth, and brought them to London alive ; and he observed 

 the remarkable change produced by the sun's heat on them ; for the saline 

 matter in Greenland, which certainly was analogous to a fixed salt, became, in 

 a month's time, almost to the same volatility as that which naturally grows in 

 England. 



