CONTENTS.

I. ORTENSIO LANDO, A HUMORIST OF THE RENAISSANCE.

BY WILLIAM E. A. AXON, F.R.S.L.

II. BURTON'S PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA; AN UNPUBLISHED MS.
OF THE LATE SIR RICHARD F. BURTON, F.R.S.L.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY W. H. WILKINS, M.A.,
F.R.S.L., EDITOR OF THE BURTON MSS.

1899 11 מ

NUMBER "NINE," CHIEFLY CONSIDERED
IN ITS HISTORICAL AND LITERARY
ASPECTS.

BY JAMES CURTIS, F.S.A., V.P.R.S.L., AND OFFICIER
D'ACADÉMIE.

[Read March 8th, 1899.]

Nor being a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, it may be thought presumption on my part to deal with figures; and being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, it may be considered irrelevant to the objects of this Society to approach such a subject. However, I trust that the matter may be found cognate to our Transactions,' and I hope to make it interesting. I sigh for the genius of Swift, who made a work of art out of Meditations on a Broomstick.'

6

The journey to Brindisi was an ordinary adventure in a fly-boat. Horace has made it live for

ever.

Voltaire, in his writes

'Philosophical Dictionary,'

"Pythagoras was the first, it is said, who discovered divine virtue in numbers. I doubt whether he was the first; for he had travelled in Egypt, Babylon, and India, and must have related much of their arts and knowledge. The Indians particularly, the inventors of the combined and complicated game of chess, and of cyphers so con21

VOL. XX.