and a commission was appointed to decide as to the genuineness of the remains believed to be those of St. Louis. An adverse decision was pronounced, the reasons for discrediting the legend on the subject being fully set forth by M. Letrenne, the secretary of the commission. More authentic are the remains cherished at Rouen as representing the heart of Richard the Lion-hearted; though in this case again all similitude to a heart, whether in shape or in substance, has entirely disappeared. The descendants of St. Louis have in most cases had their hearts preserved, though for different reasons from those which seemed to have actuated the pious Crusader in his distant exile. Louis XIV., whose body, like that of his predecessors and successors even to the eighteenth of the same name, was to be buried at Saint-Denis, gave his heart to the Jesuits: “that heart,” says the Duc de Saint-Simon, “which loved none and which few loved.” The heart of Louis XVIII. was in like manner entrusted to the keeping of a religious house; and the same custom would doubtless have been followed when Louis XV. died of small-pox, had the dangerous condition of the body allowed of its being done. [Illustration: ELM TREE IN THE COURT OF HONOUR AT THE DEAF AND DUMB INSTITUTION.] From Louis XV. to Louis XVIII. no king of France died on the throne. But when the postmortem examination was made of the child who perished in the Temple, Dr. Pelletan, one of the surgeons who took part in the operation, placed aside the heart of the so-called Louis XVII., and, some twenty years afterwards, offered it to Louis XVIII., who, however, declined the gift. Whether the king disbelieved Dr. Pelletan’s story, or whether, as a certain set of writers maintain, he regarded as two different beings the child who died in the Temple and Louis XVII. (believed by many to have been smuggled out of prison and replaced by a substitute) has never been made known. The reputed heart of Louis XVII. did not in any case possess for Louis XVII.’s successor the value that Dr. Pelletan had hoped. Such relics cannot indeed be prized if any uncertainty exists as to their identity. About the same time that Dr. Pelletan, by his own account, was appropriating to himself the heart of Louis XVII., the heart of the great Buffon somehow became lost. Buffon had bequeathed his heart to a friend for whom he entertained the deepest affection. But the son, who had a great affection for his father, refused to part with it, and offered in its place his father’s brain. The heart was somehow lost in the midst of the revolutionary troubles, but the brain has been preserved even until now. The illustrious Cuvier wished at one time to purchase it, in order to place it at the foot of Buffon’s statue. At another time the Russian Government wished to buy it; and a high bid was once made for it by the proprietor of a museum of curiosities; until at last it became the property of the State.