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These encouraging words were followed by a request that he would keep a careful account of all extraordinary expenses, that they might be duly met by the Society: "I allude, you perceive, to such things," the letter goes on to explain, "as your journies huc et illuc in quest of a better market, and to the occasional bribes to disheartened workmen.

F. belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp ob ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introque mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI. Of the Latinity of the inscription much cannot be said; but it means that 'Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced by the great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought and placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of the philosophers of his day.

Races like the Tartar Mongols, who, as we are informed by the Abbé Huc, not unfrequently move their tents several times a day, out of simple restlessness, cannot desire the same stability that is sought by other races, who have the beaver’s instinct for building and colonizing, such as the Romans.

That vivacious traveller, Pere Huc, tells us he has seen a Tartar chief at dinner gravely hand over to an underling a piece of gristle he found himself unable to masticate, and that the gift was received with every semblance of gratitude and delight. But there is a simple straightforwardness about an act like this which commends it to our understanding.

It was stifling within, redolent of garlic and lamp oil soot. In addition to the organ, there struck up the wailing of two harsh flutes, and an Ethopian, rolling the whites of his eyes, thrummed upon an Arab drum. A dancer was skipping and throwing somersaults on a tightrope, clapping his hands to the time of the music, and singing a popular song: Hue, huc, convenite nunc Spatalocinaedi!

After eighteen months' travel, Messrs Huc and Gabet arrived at the Thibetian town of Lha-Ssa, where, under the protection of the local authorities, they remained unmolested for several weeks; but their presence excited the jealousy of Ki-Chan, the deputy of the emperor of China, and at his instigation the nomekhan of Lha-Ssa ordered them to quit.

In stages like that described by Huc as still existing among the Tibetans, where "the Lama is not merely a priest, he is the painter, poet, sculptor, architect, physician," there are joined in the same individual, or group of individuals, the potentialities out of which gradually arise the specialized groups we know as professions.

Here is the true humorous contrast between the ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been degraded in the popular conception. And is it too absurd to be within the limits even of comic probability? Is it even so absurd as those hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet saw in Tartary?

At least, two generations ago Abbé Huc placed the proportion at one in three. But lamas are not all of one sort. There are those who live in community, permanently attached to some one of the hundreds of lamasseries.

In fine, it is this ungenerous treatment that has paralysed my plans, and caused me to give up the idea I once had of inserting here the newly-discovered mode of preparing quadrupeds and serpents; and without it the account of this last expedition to the wilds of Guiana is nothing but a fragment. Farewell, gentle reader. Nunc huc, nunc illuc et utrinque sine ordine curro.