Turgot himself, however, found time, in his industry at Limoges, to make a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In 1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith, which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price, of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once more:--'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands. If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous. V.