LXIII. It is said of a celebrated mathematician named Proclus, who lived in the reign of the emperor Anastasius, that he did the same with Archimedes, that is, with burning glasses, set fire to the ships with which count Vitalianus besieged Constantinople. The silence of all the authors with respect to this matter, who were prior to Zonaras, and who gave accounts of the war between Anastasius and Vitalianus, is an argument against the probability of it; for neither Evagrius the scholiast, who lived in the same century that war happened, which was the sixth, nor count Marcelinus, who flourished in the seventh, nor Cedrenus, who wrote in the eleventh, speak a word of Proclus or his burning-glasses. Zonaras, who lived in the twelfth, is the first who gives any relation of them, though he does not positively affirm the truth of it, but only tells us the story with an _it is so said_, or reported. I add to this, that count Marcelinus informs us count Vitalianus did not raise the siege of Constantinople because his fleet was destroyed, but because the emperor Anastasius solicited and procured the raising the siege, by means of a large sum of money, and other magnificent presents which he sent to count Vitalianus. LXIV. I recollect also, that in a work called The Theatre of Human Life, we find Evagrius, and Paul the Deacon, quoted in favour of the story of the burning-glasses of Proclus; but neither in one or other of these authors is there the least mention of such glasses; from whence we may infer that these great compilations are exposed to great mistakes. SECT. XXVIII. _Communication of the Red Seas with the Mediterranean._ LXV. We read in various histories, that some princes endeavoured to make a communication between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, by means of a cut from the Red Sea to the Nile; but that, in the execution of the work, they met with such difficulties that were next to insuperable; the principal of which was the apprehension that the Red Sea being much higher than the Nile, its waters would inundate Egypt. In the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, in the year 1702, when they were examining the geographical map which Monsieur Boutier had made of Egypt, they examined this point also, and found that such an apprehension was chimerical: they push’d their enquiries further, and discovered, upon reading some antient historians, that there was great reason to conclude, that in the very remote ages there had been such a canal of communication. SECT. XXIX. _Pharamond, the Salique Law, and Twelve Peers of France._