This proof, about which so much noise has been made, was not conducted precisely as people have imagined. It has been supposed that a conjugal consummation took place under the inspection of physicians, surgeons, and midwives, but such was not the fact. The parties went to bed in the usual manner, and at a proper time the inspectors, who were assembled in the next room, were called on to pronounce upon the case. In the famous process of the Marquis de Langeais, decided in 1659, he demanded "the congress"; and owing to the management of his lady (Marie de St. Simon) did not succeed. He demanded a second trial, but the judges, fatigued with the clamors of the superstitious, the plaints of the prudes, and the raillery of the wits, refused it. They declared the marquis impotent, his marriage void, forbade him to marry again, and allowed his wife to take another husband. The marquis, however, disregarded this sentence, and married Diana de Navailles, by whom he had seven children! His first wife being dead, the marquis appealed to the grand chamberlain against the sentence which had declared him impotent, and charged him with the costs. The grand chamberlain, sensible of the ridicule applicable to the whole affair, confirmed his marriage with Diana de Navailles, declared him most potent, refused him the costs, but abolished the ceremony of the congress altogether. The President Bouhier published a defence of the proof by congress, when it' was no longer in use. He maintained, that the judges would not have committed the error of abolishing it, had they not been guilty of the previous error of refusing the marquis a second trial. But if the congress may prove indecisive, how much more uncertain are the various other examinations had recourse to in cases of alleged impotency? Ought not the whole of them to be adjourned, as in Athens, for a hundred years? These causes are shameful to wives, ridiculous for husbands, and unworthy of the tribunals, and it would be better not to allow them at all. Yes, it may be said, but, in that case, marriage would not insure issue. A great misfortune, truly, while Europe contains three hundred thousand monks and eighty thousand nuns, who voluntarily abstain from propagating their kind. INALIENATION--INALIENABLE. The domains of the Roman emperors were anciently inalienable--it was the sacred domain. The barbarians came and rendered it altogether inalienable. The same thing happened to the imperial Greek domain. After the re-establishment of the Roman Empire in Germany, the sacred domain was declared inalienable by the priests, although there remains not at present a crown's worth of territory to alienate.