CONSTANTIN FRANÇOIS CHASSEBOEUF, COMTE DE, was born of good family at Craon in Anjou on the 3d of February 1757. Passing from the colleges of Ancenis and Anger, he went to Paris, where he studied law for a time, but ultimately took to medicine. Being possessed of a competency, he set out for the east in 1783, and spent some years in traversing Lower Egypt and Syria. He published on his return to France in 1787, his Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, which for sagacity, learning, acuteness, and spirit, was pronounced the first work on the subject extant. In September 1791, he published his celebrated Ruines, in which he first gave to the world those peculiar views regarding the symbolical character of all forms of religion, which have brought his name into such popular notoriety. It is full of ingenious though very extravagant views. Two years afterwards he published his well-known brochure on the Principes Physiques de la Morale, being an attempt to construct an ethical system on a material basis. Volney was thrown into prison by Robespierre as a royalist, where he lay for ten months. On his release he was appointed professor of history at the new École Normale, where he delighted crowded audiences by his brilliant lectures. In 1795 appeared the first of his philosophical writings, being the Simplification des Langues Orientales, which, it is to be feared, effected more in name than in fact. On the suppression of the Normal school during the same year, Volney proceeded to America, where he remained till the spring of 1798, when he returned to France. Bonaparte, whom Volney had known in Corsica in 1793, was now the leading man in France, and there sprung up a friendship between them as warm as it was short-lived. Volney was made a comte by Bonaparte during their intimacy, and he was made commandant of the Legion of Honour. He voted for the deposition of Napoleon on the 2d of April 1814, and he was made a peer on the 4th of June by Louis XVIII. In 1814 he published Recherches Nouvelles sur l'Histoire Ancienne, of which a considerable part had already appeared under different forms. The later years of Volney were much occupied with his philological studies, of which he published a considerable number of papers. He died on the 23d of April 1820. See the Œuvres Complètes de Volney, with a notice of his life by A. Bossange, 8 vols. Paris, 1826. Volney made a vaunt of his irreligion, and in all his works, particularly in his Histoire de Samuel inventeur de sacre des rois, he took occasion to hold up the contents of the sacred Scriptures to the mockery and derision of mankind.