"What happened? Foreigners bought out four editions of this French work
which was proscribed in France, and made about eighteen hundred thousand
dollars.

"Frenchmen, try hereafter to understand your own interests."[Footnote:
This story is printed among "Faceties." Morley points out that Mme. de
Pompadour died before the volumes containing "Poudre" and "Rouge" were
published. Voltaire, xlviii. 57.]

We see by this anecdote, written probably to puff the book, that the
"Encyclopaedia" was recommended for the same advantages which have since
given value to scores of similar works. No other collection of general
information so large and so useful was then in existence. Elaborate
descriptions of mechanism abound in it, and are illustrated by beautiful
plates. We see before us the simple beginnings of the great
manufacturing movement of modern times. There are articles on looms, on
cabinet work, on jewelry, side by side with all that the science of that
day could teach of anatomy, medicine, and natural history. Nor were more
frivolous subjects forgotten. Nine plates are given to billiards and
tennis. Choregraphy, or the art of expressing the figures of the dance
on paper, occupies six pages of text and two of illustrations, with the
remark that it is one of the arts of which the ancients were ignorant,
or which they have not transmitted to us. There is a proposal for a new
and universal language, based of course on French; and we are reminded
by an article on Alcahest, a mysterious drug of the alchemists, to which
two columns and a half are devoted, that the eighteenth century was
nearer to the Middle Ages than the nineteenth. It was an idea of the
compilers of the "Encyclopaedia" that if ever civilization should be
destroyed mankind might turn to their volumes to learn to restore it.
[Footnote: History and geography are almost passed over in the