What tends to confirm them in this erroneous opinion is a passage in the same Exodus: "Take of pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of sweet cinnamon half as much; of sweet calamus two hundred and fifty shekels; of cassia five hundred shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; and of olive-oil a ton, to form an ointment to annoint the tabernacle"; and whosoever anointed himself or any stranger with a similar composition, was to be put to death. It is added that with all these aromatics were to be united stacte, onyx, galbanum, and frankincense; and that a perfume was to be mixed up according to the art of the apothecary or perfumer. But I cannot perceive anything in this composition which ought to excite the doubt of the incredulous. It is natural to imagine that the Jews--who, according to the text, stole from the Egyptians all which they could bring away--had also taken frankincense, galbanum, onyx, stacte, olive-oil, cassia, sweet calamus, cinnamon, and myrrh. They also, without doubt, stole many shekels; indeed, we have seen, that one of the most zealous partisans of this Hebrew horde estimates what they stole, in gold alone, at nine millions. I abide by his reckoning. SIBYL. The first woman who pronounced oracles at Delphos was called Sibylla. According to Pausanias, she was the daughter of Jupiter, and of Lamia, the daughter of Neptune, and she lived a long time before the siege of Troy. From her all women were distinguished by the name of sibyls, who, without being priestesses, or even attached to a particular oracle, announced the future, and called themselves inspired. Different ages and countries have had their sibyls, or preserved predictions which bear their name, and collections were formed of them. The greatest embarrassment to the ancients was to explain by what happy privilege these sibyls had the gift of predicting the future. Platonists found the cause of it in the intimate union which the creature, arrived at a certain degree of perfection, might have with the Divinity. Others attribute this divine property of the sibyls to the vapors and exhalations of the caves which they inhabited. Finally others attributed the prophetic spirit of the sibyls to their sombre and melancholy humor, or to some singular malady. St. Jerome maintained that this gift was to them a recompense for their chastity; but there was at least one very celebrated one who boasted of having had a thousand lovers without being married. It would have been much more sensible in St. Jerome and other fathers of the Church to have denied the prophetic spirit of the sibyls, and to have said that by means of hazarding predictions at a venture, they might sometimes have been fulfilled, particularly with the help of a favorable commentary, by which words, spoken by chance, have been turned into facts which it was impossible they could have predicted.