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 NEW BOOKS. 421 principle of distinction " (French revient dans les individus au principe de distinction) ; p. 170, "... a multitude of objects which do not recur immediately, end the nature of which could not go on to obtain their ends" (French qui ne nous reviennent pas tout a fait et dont la nature n' pu se passer, i.e., which are not altogether pleasing to us, though nature has not been able to dispense with them) ; p. 133, " this proves all fae more " (French tout mi plus). (3) Sheer blunders in transla- tion, of the kind popularly known as " howlers," e.g., p. 100, " the being we is innate" (French 1'etre nous est inne) ; p. 142, "water, cold or warm, pure or salt" (French sale); p. 97, "they have taught them drunkenness, when carrying them the water of life" (French en leur apportant de I'eau de vie) ; p. 160, " the modifications of extension, when not joined to number, cannot be distinguished by figure " (French ne peuvent etre distinguees que par la figure) ; p. 178, " a cloudy perception " (French une perception nue) ; p. 181, "the soul. . . preserves its own perfections, and although dependent upon the body (in seizing the good) in the voluntary acts, it is independent ... in others " (French a le bien prendre = to state the case correctly ; voluntary is also a mistake for /^voluntary in this passage) ; p. 192, "it is just what men have done " (French mais voila comme les homines sont fciits). These are but a few examples, chosen at haphazard out of hundreds of others, but they are in themselves enough to convict Mr. Langley of utter incompetence for the position of translator of Leibnitz. No amount of zeal for an author is sufficient to atone for the linguistic ignorance which turns sentence after sentence of his chief work into mere nonsense, least of all in the case of a writer so full of pregnant and suggestive ideas as Leibnitz. And it is adding insult to injury when Mr. Langley, at p. xv. of his preface, lays the blame for the inelegance of his translation on the " abrupt and obscure and sometimes even ungrammatical " style of the author. No one, of course, would pretend that the Nouveaux Essais display the copious elegance which charms us in Malebranche's Recherche, but I venture to say that there is scarcely a sentence in the whole work which is obscure enough to cause serious difficulty to a tolerably good French scholar, and I doubt if there is even one apart of course from textual corruptions which is ungrammatical. The particular construction at which Mr. Langley boggles (see p. xv. and the absurd note on p. 768) that of la plupart with a verb in the plural number is, of course, as regular and familiar in French as the singular verb with neuter plural subject in Greek. Indeed, one hardly knows whether to be more amazed that so poor a French scholar as Mr. Langley should have had the courage to translate the Nouveaux Essais, or that none of the learned gentlemen who are mentioned in the preface as having encouraged him in the task should have had the candour to recommend some six months' assiduous study of the French tongue as a desirable preliminary to the work of translation. It is a more pleasurable duty to speak of the quality of Mr. Langley's annotations to Leibnitz than to deal with his perversions of the text. A final judgment on the value of the great mass of historical notes could only be passed by one who had devoted the same time and pains to the interpretation of Leibnitz that Mr. Langley has done. I will only say here that as far as I have been able to test Mr. Langley, his antiquarian information seems sound as well as copious ; and it is in the main in this work of explaining obscure allusions and references that he has deserved best of Leibnitz and of students of philosophy. Even with regard to the notes, however, I cannot omit to call attention to a few unfortunate mis- representations. The prim um mobile is not "in Aristotle's philosophy