FRANCIS PETIT DE LA, secretary and interpreter to the king of France, in the Turkish and Arabic languages, was born in 1622, and died in 1695, in his seventy-third year, after having held this employment for the space of forty-four years. It appears that he executed the duty of his office with as much integrity as ability; for, when the Algerines sought peace with Louis XIV., conditions were offered, by which they were required to reimburse to this monarch six hundred thousand francs. The terms being thought exorbitant, they had recourse to stratagems, and offered a large sum to La Croix, the interpreter, if he would put into the treaty crowns of Tripoli instead of French crowns; which would have made a difference to the Algerines of more than one hundred thousand livres. But the integrity of the interpreter triumphed over the temptation; which, in fact, was the greater, as it was next to impossible that the proposed fraud could have been discovered. Besides the Turkish and the Arabic, the Persian and the Tartar, he also understood the Ethiopic and Armenian languages, and is well known to the learned world by many works. He translated the History of France into the Turkish language; he digested the three volumes of Voyages into the East Indies of Thevenot; he made an accurate catalogue of all the Turkish and Persian books contained in the king's library; he composed two complete Dictionaries of the French and Turkish languages; and, at the time of his death, he was about to present the world with the history of Genghis Khan. He undertook this history by the order of M. Colbert; a minister who, altogether intent upon aggrandizing his master, was accustomed every week to call together, either in the king's library or in his own, certain learned men, whom, according as they excelled in their several departments in literature, he constantly set to work. This history, which cost La Croix more than ten years' labour, is useful not only to the learned who are curious to know past events, and to geographers who had hitherto been ignorant of Great Tartary, but likewise to all who trade to China, Persia, or other parts of the eastern world. There is a good map of northern Asia drawn by Delisle, accompanying the work, which M. Petit de la Croix, the author's son, not only revised, but, in order to render it more curious, added to it an abridgment of the lives of all those authors from whom it had been extracted. It was translated into English, and published at London, 1722, 8vo.