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 called the Vedidad-Sade, and some other works. From thence he proposed going to Benares, to study the languages, antiquities, and sacred laws of the Hindoos; but the capture of Pondicherry obliged him to return to France. He accordingly embarked on board an English vessel, and landed at Portsmouth, in the month of November 1761. After spending some time in London, and visiting Oxford, he set out for Paris, where he arrived on the 4th of May 1762, without fortune, or the desire of acquiring any; but esteeming himself rich in the possession of an hundred and eighty oriental manuscripts, besides other curiosities. The Abbé Barthelemy, and his other friends, procured for him a pension, with the title and appointments of Interpreter for the oriental languages at the royal library. In 1763, the Academy of the Belles Lettres received him among the number of its associates; and from that period, he devoted himself to the arrangement and publication of the materials he had collected during his eastern travels. In 1771, he published a work in three volumes 4to, under the title of Zend-Avesta, containing collections from the sacred writings of the Persians, among which are fragments of works ascribed to Zoroaster; and he accompanied this work with an account of the life of that sage. This publication must be considered as constituting a very important accession to our stores of oriental literature. A recent historian, and very competent judge, refers to the Zend-Avesta, as certainly the most authentic source from which we can derive information regarding the religion and institutions of the great Persian legislator. (Sir John Malcolm’s Hist. of Persia, Vol. I. p. 198, Note.) To the Zend-Avesta M. Du Perron prefixed a discourse, in which he treated the University of Oxford, and some of its learned members, with ridicule and disrespect. Mr (afterwards Sir William) Jones replied to these invectives in an anonymous letter, addressed to the author, written in French, with uncommon force and correctness of style, but at the same time, with a degree of asperity which could only be justified by the petulance of M. Du Perron. In 1778, he published his Legislation Orientale, in 4to; a work in which he controverts the system of Montesquieu, and endeavours to prove, that the nature of oriental despotism has been misrepresented by most authors; that in the empires of Turkey, Persia, and Hindostan, there are codes of written law, which equally bind the prince and subject; and that, in these three empires, the inhabitants possess both moveable and immoveable property, which they enjoy with perfect security. His Recherches Historiques et Geographiques sur l’Inde, appeared in 1786, and formed part of Thieffenthaler’s Geography of India. They were followed, in 1789, by his treatise De la Dignité du Commerce et de l’etat du Commerçant. The Revolution seems to have greatly affected him. During that period, he abandoned society, shut himself up in his study, and devoted himself entirely to literary seclusion. In 1798, he published L’Inde en Rapport avec l’Europe, &c. in 2 vols. 8vo; a work which is more remarkable for its virulent invectives against the English, and for its numerous misrepresentations, than for the information which it contains, or the soundness of the reflections which it conveys. The spirit of the work, indeed, may be ascertained from the summary of its contents, stated in the title-page, in which the author professes to give a detailed, accurate, and terrific picture of the English Machiavelism in India; and he addresses his work, in a ranting, bombastic dedication, to the Manes of Dupleix and Labourdonnais. In 1804, he published a Latin translation from the Persian of the Oupnek’hat, or Upanischada, i. e. “Secrets which must not be revealed,” in 2 vols. 4to. On the re-organization of the Institute, M. Anquetil was elected a member, but soon afterwards gave in his resignation. He died at Paris on the 17th of January 1805.

Besides the works we have already enumerated, M. Anquetil read to the Academy several memoirs on subjects connected with the history and antiquities of the East. At the time of his death, he was engaged in revising a translation of the Travels of Father Paulin de St Barthelemy in India; which work was continued by M. Silvestre de Sacy, and published in 1808, in 3 vols. 8vo. He also left behind him a great number of manuscripts, among which, his biographers particularly notice the translation of a Latin treatise on the Church, by Doctor Legros, in 4 vols. 4to.

From the preceding narrative, our readers will be enabled to form some notion of the character of Anquetil Du Perron. Among his countrymen, he is regarded as one of the most learned men of the eighteenth century. He certainly distinguished himself by a very ardent and disinterested zeal im the prosecution of those studies to which he dedicated the labours of a long life; but the lustre of his literary character was obscured by a very absurd vanity, and the most inveterate prejudices. In a Discourse addressed to the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, in 1789, Sir William Jones speaks of him, as “having had the merit of undertaking a voyage to India, in his earliest youth, with no other view than to recover the writings of Zeratust (Zoroaster), and who would have acquired a brilliant reputation in France, if he had not sullied it by his immoderate vanity and virulence of temper, which alienated the good-will even of his own countrymen.” In the same Discourse, he affirms, that M. Anquetil most certainly had no knowledge of the Sanscrit.—See ''Biographie Universelle. Monthly Rev.'' Vol. LXI. Lord Teignmouth’s Life of Sir William Jones.

 ANT. The history of a tribe of insects so long celebrated for their industry and frugality, and for the display of that sagacity which characterizes some of the higher orders of animals, is peculiarly calculated to occupy the attention of modern naturalists. The ancients, indeed, had often noticed the habits and economy of the ant; but their accounts, at all times deficient in accuracy from the want of precise definitions and logical arrangement of the objects they describe, are, in this instance, so mixed up with fanciful notions, and chimerical doctrines, and so coloured by the vivid imagination and credulity of the narrators, as to have retarded rather than advanced the progress of real knowledge. Aristotle and Pliny report, for instance, that the labours of ants are in a great measure regulated by the phases