With all his alchemical skill, Delisle was unable to read or write, and in disposition he was untractable, rude, and fanatical. He was invited to Court, but he pretended that the climate he lived in was necessary to the success of his experiments, inasmuch as his preparations were vegetable. The Bishop of Senez, suspecting him of unwillingness rather than inability, obtained a _lettre de cachet_, after two years of continual subterfuge on the part of the alchemist, who was thereupon arrested and taken on the road to Paris. During the journey, his guards, after endeavouring to extort his supposed riches, wounded him severely on the head, in which state, on his arrival at the Bastille, he was forced to begin his alchemical operations, but after a short time he persistently refused to proceed, tore continually the bandages from his wound in the frenzy of his desperation, and in the year following his imprisonment he poisoned himself. His illegitimate son, Alnys, by some means inherited a portion of the powder from his mother. He wandered through Italy and Germany performing transmutations. On one occasion he made projection before the Duke of Richlieu, then French ambassador at Vienna, and who assured the Abbé Langlet that he not only saw the operation performed, but performed it himself, twice on gold and forty times on silver. Alnys made a considerable collection of gold coins, ancient and modern, while on a journey through Austria and Bohemia. On his return to Aix he presented himself to the President of Provence, who desired him to call the next day. Alnys, suspecting an intention to arrest him, fled in the interim. He was afterwards imprisoned at Marseilles, whence he contrived to escape to Brussels. It was here, in 1731, that he gave some philosophic mercury to M. Percell, the brother of Langlet de Fresnoy, which mercury the recipient fermented imperfectly, but succeeded so far as to convert an ounce of silver into gold. The death of a certain M. Grefier shortly after some operations on corrosive sublimate, by which Alnys proposed to instruct him in alchemy, made it necessary for him to depart, and he was heard of no more. JOHN HERMANN OBEREIT.