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The riders remounted their homes, put them to a gallop, and soon disappeared round a bend which the road makes a short distance before it reaches the woods of Monnet. They had scarcely disappeared when a notable change took place in the demeanor of our market-man. He stopped his horse, straightened up, put the mouthpiece of a tiny trumpet to his lips, and blew three times.

On the contrary, it was a blooded horse, so that Montbar easily overtook the two riders, and passed them on the road between the woods of Monnet and Polliat. The horse, except for a short stop at Saint-Cyr-sur-Menthon, did the twenty-eight or thirty miles between Bourg and Macon, without resting, in three hours.

M. Monnet has imagined a petrifying power in water very different from any that has hitherto been conceived, I believe, by natural philosophers, and I also believe, altogether inconsistent with experience or matter of fact; but as it is not without good reason that this naturalist has been induced to look out for a petrifying cause different from any hitherto supposed, and as he has endeavoured very properly to refute the systems of petrification hitherto received, I would beg leave to transcribe his reasoning upon the subject in corroboration of the present theory of consolidation by the means of fusion.

These forces amounted to about twenty-five or six thousand men, not counting the divisions Monnet and Boudet, ten thousand men in all, commanded by Desaix, and now, as we have said, detached from the main army to cut off the retreat of the enemy to Genoa. Only, instead of making that retreat, the enemy were now attacking.

This opinion of M. Monnet, concerning the diminution of water upon the earth, does not follow necessarily from those appearances which he has mentioned.

General Monnet, who commanded at Flushing, was an old officer of the revolution wars, brave and daring and he did his best in opposing the landing of the English, with a part of his forces, and in gallantly defending the place; but the inundation did not succeed, on account of the elevation of the ground and the wind being contrary.

Then, without troubling himself about his cart and vegetables, which he left in his servant's charge, the ex-marketman, who was none other than our old acquaintance Montbar, turned his horse's head toward the Monnet woods, and set out at a gallop. His mount was not a miserable post hack, like that on which Roland was riding.

Abbe Monnet, Superior of the Society of the Holy Ghost, was appointed to succeed him, and Rev. Abbe Liebermann, a distinguished convert from Judaism, was unanimously elected to the post of superior-general of the two united societies. The labors of Abbe Liebermann were crowned with complete success.

M. Monnet considers the natural operations of water, upon the surface of the earth, as truly forming the shape of that surface; but he draws some very different conclusions from those which I have formed. It is in his Nouveau Voyage Minéralogique, fait dans cette partie du Hainault connue sou le nom de Thiérache. Journal de Physique, Aoust 1784.

I dare say that this is not the view that M. Monnet takes of the subject, when he thinks to explain to himself the concretion of those different substances by means of water; but, according to my apprehension of the matter, his theory, when sifted to the bottom, will bear no other construction; and, unless he shall consider water like the matter of heat, as capable of producing the fluidity of fusion, and of being also again abstracted from the fluid, by pervading the most solid body, which would then be a substance different from water, he must employ this aqueous substance as a menstruum or solvent for solid bodies, in the same manner as has been done by those naturalists whom he he justly censure, and conform to those erroneous ideas which first observations, or inaccurate knowledge of minerals, may have suggested to former naturalists.