e supplied out
of the revenues of the town.

One of his first cares was the advancement of learning. Immediately
upon his accession, he wrote to Rollin and Voltaire, that he desired
the continuance of their friendship; and sent for Mr. Maupertuis, the
principal of the French academicians, who passed a winter in Lapland,
to verify, by the mensuration of a degree near the pole, the Newtonian
doctrine of the form of the earth. He requested of Maupertuis to come
to Berlin, to settle an academy, in terms of great ardour and great
condescension.

At the same time, he showed the world that literary amusements were
not likely, as has more than once happened to royal students, to
withdraw him from the care of the kingdom, or make him forget his
interest. He began by reviving a claim to Herstal and Hermal, two
districts in the possession of the bishop of Liege. When he sent his
commissary to demand the homage of the inhabitants, they refused him
admission, declaring that they acknowledged no sovereign but the
bishop. The king then wrote a letter to the bishop, in which he
complained of the violation of his right, and the contempt of his
authority, charged the prelate with countenancing the late act of
disobedience, and required an answer in two days.

In three days the answer was sent, in which the bishop founds his
claim to the two lordships, upon a grant of Charles the fifth,
guaranteed by France and Spain; alleges that his predecessors had
enjoyed this grant above a century, and that he never intended to
infringe the rights of Prussia; but as the house of Brandenburgh had
always made some pretensions to that territory, he was willing to do
what other bishops had offered, to purchase that claim for a hundred
thousand crowns.

To every man that knows the state of the feudal countries, the
intricacy of their pedigrees, the confusion of their alliances, and
the different rules of inheritance that prevail in different places,
it will appear evident, that of reviving antiquated claims there can
be no end, and that the possession of a century is a better title than
can commonly be produced. So long a prescription supposes an
acquiescence in the other claimants; and that acquiescence supposes
also some reason, perhaps now unknown, for which the claim was
forborne. Whether this rule could be considered as valid in the
controversy between these sovereigns, may, however, be doubted, for
the bishop's answer seems to imply, that the