L E T L E U
plete the translation of Strabo (1805-1819) which had been begun by Laporte-Dutheil, and in March 1816 he was one of those who were admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions by royal ordinance, having previously contributed a Mémoire, "On the Metrical System of the Egyptians," which had been crowned. Further promotion came rapidly; in 1817 he was appointed director of the École des Chartes, in 1819 inspector-general of the university, and in 1831 professor of history in the Collége de France. This chair he exchanged in 1838 for that of archæology, and in 1840 he succeeded Daunou as keeper of the national archives. Meanwhile he had published, among other works, Considerations générales sur l'évaluation des monnaies grecques et romaines et sur la valeur de l'or et de l'argent avant la découverte de l'Amérique (1817), Recherches pour servir à l'histoire d'Égypte, pendant la domination des Grecs et des Romains (1823), and Sur l'origine Grecque des zodiaques prétendus égyptiens (1837); by the last-named he finally exploded a fallacy which had up to that time vitiated the chronology of contemporary Egyptologists. His Diplomes et chartres de l'époque Mérovingienne sur papyrus et sur velin were published in 1844. The most important work of Letronne is the Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines de l'Égypte, of which the first volume appeared in 1842, and the second in 1848. He died at Paris on December 14, 1848.
LETTRES DE CACHET are really lettres closes, that is, letters sealed in such a way that they cannot be opened without breaking the seal, and which were originally always addressed to individuals, in contradistinction to lettres patentes, or letters patent, beginning "know all men by these presents." Lettres closes interfering with the administration of justice or the liberty of the subject were forbidden by numerous edicts in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, and the term lettres de cachet, as synonymous with lettres closes, is first found in the ordinance of Orleans in 1560. The convenience of such a means to consign one's enemies to prison was seen by Richelieu and Mazarin, who followed the Guise Government in using them frequently, despite numerous protestations on the part of the parlements, of which the most notable was when in 1648 an ordinance was registered that no man should be kept in prison three days without interrogation. When once Louis XIV. had begun to rule, he made frequent use of lettres de cachet both for state purposes and to control and disorganize his nobility, and he boldly justified their use in an edict of 1705. But the most marked justification is to be found in the circular letter addressed to the parlements of France in reply to protests against arbitrary imprisonment in 1759, in which the king says that "he reserves arbitrary orders – in other words, lettres de cachet – for occasions wherein they may be necessary for the public good and the interests of families." In this remark he distinguishes between the two purposes for which such letters were granted. He first alleges state reasons why he should have power to arrest arbitrarily – a power no one would deny to the executive on occasions of emergency, if used under proper restrictions. Secondly, he says that they are issued in the interest of families, and here he touches the great source of their injustice and unpopularity. It was the custom for the king to sign a number of blank lettres de cachet which his ministers gave away to whoever they pleased. Thus they often fell into hands of people who used them to gratify private hate; fathers obtained them and inserted the names of their sons, wives inserted the names of their husbands, opera dancers those of lovers who had spurned them. The evil grew to such a height that Turgot and Lamoignon de Malesherbes refused to enter the ministry of Louis XVI. unless they might see the contents of the orders they countersigned, and see the causes for which men were to be imprisoned. It is needless to say that when the cahiers of the primary assemblies were prepared, to instruct the deputies to the states-general in the wishes of their constituents, abolition of lettres de cachet was demanded in almost all the cahiers of the noblesse and tiers état. The subject was mentioned in the early debates of the Constituent Assembly, but lettres de cachet were not formally abolished till January 15, 1790, and on March 13 of the same year all imprisoned under them were ordered to be set at liberty. The great authority for the history and injustice of lettres de cachet is Mirabeau's Enquiries concerning Lettres de Cachet and State Prisons, written in the dungeon at Vincennes into which his father had thrown him by a lettre de cachet. It is one of the ablest and most eloquent of his works, had an immense circulation, and was translated into English with a dedication to the duke of Norfolk in 1788. See also Mercier's Tableaux de Paris (ed. 1783), vol. vii. chap. 588, and numerous stories in Linguet's Bastille, and especially in the Bastille dévoilée (1790).
LETTS. See LITHUANIANS.
LEUCADIA. See SANTA MAURA.
LEUCIPPUS, the founder of Atomism in Greek philosophy, flourished about the middle or latter half of the 5th century B.C. Almost nothing is known of his life. His birthplace is variously given as Elea, Abdera, or Miletus. It is disputed whether he left any writings. Empedocles of Agrigentum and Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ were his contemporaries, while Zeno the Eleatic is said to have been his teacher. As pupil and associate he had Democritus of Abdera, beside whose greater fame his own work has been thrown into the background. Thus Epicurus would not look upon him as a philosopher at all; Lucretius ignored him; and he is barely mentioned by Lange, the modern historian of materialism. But the references of Aristotle, as well as of later authorities, leave no doubt that the leading principles of the Atomic theory are due to him. He eluded the Eleatic criticism of plurality and motion by postulating the reality of that which is not, the empty or space. Empty space and atoms are, he held, the ultimate constituents of all things. The former is infinite in magnitude; the latter are infinite in number, indivisible, and with only quantitative differences amongst one another. Nor is there any such thing as qualitative change; but all growth and decay are merely the compounding and separation of atoms. The atoms are always in activity or motion, and all things happen of necessity. Worlds, infinite in number, are produced by the atoms, variously shaped and of different weight, falling in empty space and giving rise to an eddying motion by their mutual impact. In this way worlds are being for ever produced and again destroyed. In the notices of Leucippus handed down to us there are additional traces of a cosmology, differing slightly from that of Democritus, and of a psychology which identified the soul with spherical atoms, and explained sensation and thought by a change brought about in it mechanically through the entrance of external images. The further development of the Atomic philosophy was the work of Democritus.
See Diog. Laert., De Vitis, lib. ix. c. 6; Ritter and Preller, Hist. Phil., pp. 111 sq.; Zeller, Phil. d. Griechen, 4th ed., i. 760 sq.
LEUK, or Loèche la Ville, a village of Switzerland, at the head of a district in the canton of Valais, 15 miles by rail east of Sion, on the right bank of the Rhone. The population has increased from 1220 in 1870 to 1411 in 1880. About 5 miles to the north, in the valley of the Dala, at a height of 4642 feet above the sea, and overshadowed by the immense cliffs of the Gemmi, lie the Baths of Leuk, Leukenbad, or Loéche-les-Bains, a place of only 650 permanent inhabitants, but largely frequented during
