taught better to understand his office." In England, up to about the period when these curious acts of parliament were passed, the right of all soil impregnated with animal matter was claimed by the crown for this peculiar purpose; and in France the rubbish of old houses, earth from stables, slaughter-houses, and all refuse places, was considered to belong to the Government, till 1778, when a similar edict, to relieve the people from the annoyances of the saltpetre makers, was made. J. DECK. Cambridge. * * * * * METRICAL PSALMS AND HYMNS. (Vol. iii., pp. 119. 198.) In reply to your correspondent ARUN, who inquired about the origin and authority of metrical psalms and hymns in churches, in addition to an extract from one of Bishop Cosin's letters on the subject, I referred also to the treatise commonly known as Watson's _Deduction_, but of which treatise Heylin was in fact the author. I have recently met with a passage in Heylin's _History of the Reformation_ (ann. 1552, Lond., 1674, p. 127.) which seems to contain the rudiment or first germ of the _Deduction_, and to which ARUN therefore (if not already acquainted with it) may be glad to be referred: "About this time (says Heylin) the Psalms of David did first begin to be composed in English meetter by one Thomas Sternhold, one of the grooms of the Privy Chamber; who, translating no more than thirty-seven, left both example and encouragement to John Hopkins and others to dispatch the rest:--a device first taken up in France by one Clement Marot, one of the grooms of the bedchamber to King Francis the First; who, being much addicted to poetry, and having some acquaintance with those which were thought to have enclined to the Reformation, was persuaded by the learned Vatablus (professor of the Hebrew tongue in the University of Paris) to exercise his poetical phancies in translating some of David's Psalms. For whose satisfaction, and his own, he translated the first fifty of them; and, after flying to Geneva, grew acquainted with Beza, who in some tract of time translated the other hundred also, and caused them to be fitted unto several times; which hereupon began to be sung in private houses, and by degrees to be taken up in all the churches of the French, and other nations which followed the Genevian platform. Marot's translation is said by Strada to have been ignorantly and perversely done, as being but the work of a man altogether unlearned; but not to be compared with that barbarity and botching, which everywhere occurreth in the translation of Sternhold and Hopkins. Which notwithstanding being first allowed for private devotion, they were by little and little brought into the use of the church, _permitted rather than allowed_ to be sung before and after sermons; afterwards printed and bound up with the