Declaration of the amateurs, inquirers, and doubters, who have amused themselves with proposing to the learned the preceding questions in these volumes.

We declare to the learned that being, like themselves, prodigiously ignorant of the first principles of all things, and of the natural, typical, mystical, allegorical sense of many things, we acquiesce, in regard to them, in the infallible decision of the holy Inquisition of Rome, Milan, Florence, Madrid, Lisbon, and in the decrees of the Sorbonne, the perpetual council of the French.

Our errors not proceeding from malice, but being the natural consequence of human weakness, we hope we shall be pardoned for them both in this world and the next.

We entreat the small number of celestial spirits who are still shut up in the mortal bodies in France, and who thence enlighten the universe at thirty sous per sheet, to communicate their gifts to us for the next volume, which we calculate on publishing at the end of the Lent of 1772, or in the Advent of 1773; and we will pay forty sous per sheet for their lucubrations.

We entreat the few great men who still remain to us, such as the author of the “Ecclesiastical Gazette”; the Abbé Guyon; with the Abbé Caveirac, author of the “Apology for St............