For those who have stood sponsors at the baptism of the children of each other, the dispensation will cost two thousand seven hundred and thirty livres. If they would be absolved from premature familiarity, one thousand three hundred and thirty livres in addition. He who has enjoyed the favors of a widow during the life of her deceased husband, in order to legitimately espouse her, will have to pay one hundred and ninety livres. In Spain and Portugal, the marriage dispensations are still dearer. Cousins-german cannot obtain them for less than two thousand crowns. The poor not being able to pay these taxes, abatements may be made. It is better to obtain half a right, than lose all by refusing the dispensation. No reference is had here to the sums paid to the pope for the bulls of bishops, abbots, etc., which are to be found in the almanacs; but we cannot perceive by what authority the pope of Rome levies taxes upon laymen who choose to marry their cousins. RIVERS. The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error. It is not long since it was discovered that all rivers originate in those eternal masses of snow which cover the summits of lofty mountains, those snows in rain, that rain in the vapor exhaled from the land and sea; and that thus everything is a link in the great chain of nature. When a boy, I heard theses delivered which proved that all rivers and fountains came from the sea. This was the opinion of all antiquity. These rivers flowed into immense caverns, and thence distributed their waters to all parts of the world. When Aristeus goes to lament the loss of his bees to Cyrene his mother, goddess of the little river Enipus in Thessaly, the river immediately divides itself, forming as it were two mountains of water, right and left, to receive him according to ancient and immemorial usage; after which he has a view of those vast and beautiful grottoes through which flow all the rivers of the earth; the Po, which descends from Mount Viso in Piedmont, and traverses Italy; the Teverone, which comes from the Apennines; the Phasis, which issues from Mount Caucasus, and falls into the Black Sea; and numberless others. Virgil, in this instance, adopted a strange system of natural philosophy, in which certainly none but poets can be indulged.