. While
reprinting, at Besancon, the "Primitive Elements of Languages,
Discovered by the Comparison of Hebrew roots with those of the Latin and
French," by the Abbe Bergier, Proudhon had enlarged the edition of his
"Essay on General Grammar."

The date of the edition, 1837, proves that he did not at that time think
of competing for the Suard pension. In this work, which continued and
completed that of the Abbe Bergier, Proudhon adopted the same point
of view, that of Moses and of Biblical tradition. Two years later, in
February, 1839, being already in possession of the Suard pension, he
addressed to the Institute, as a competitor for the Volney prize,
a memoir entitled: "Studies in Grammatical Classification and the
Derivation of some French words." It was his first work, revised and
presented in another form. Four memoirs only were sent to the Institute,
none of which gained the prize. Two honorable mentions were granted,
one of them to memoir No. 4; that is, to P. J. Proudhon, printer at
Besancon. The judges were MM. Amedde Jaubert, Reinaud, and Burnouf.

"The committee," said the report presented at the annual meeting of the
five academies on Thursday, May 2, 1839, "has paid especial attention to
manuscripts No. 1 and No. 4. Still, it does not feel able to grant
the prize to either of these works, because they do not appear to
be sufficiently elaborated. The committee, which finds in No. 4 some
ingenious analyses, particularly in regard to the mechanism of the
Hebrew language, regrets that the author has resorted to hazardous
conjectures, and has sometimes forgotten the special recommendation of
the committee to pursue the experimental and comparative method."

Proudhon remembered this. He attended the lectures of Eugene Burnouf,
and, as soon as he became acquainted with the labors and discoveries of
Bopp and his successors, he definitively abandoned an hypothesis which
had been condemned by the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres.
He then sold, for the value of the paper, the remaining copies of the
"Essay" published by him in 1837. In 1850, they were still lying in a
grocer's back-shop.

A neighboring publisher then placed the edition on the market, with
the attractive name of Proudhon upon it. A lawsuit ensued, in which
the author was beaten. His enemies, and at that time there were many of
them, would have been glad to have proved him a renegade and a recanter.
Proudhon, in his work on "Justice," g