rcumcised fruit:--it is unlawful to eat of the fruit of any tree
till the fifth year of its growth: the first three years of its bearing,
it is called uncircumcised; the fourth is offered to God; and the fifth
may be eaten.

The Mishna, entitled _Heterogeneous Mixtures_, contains several curious
horticultural particulars. Of divisions between garden-beds and fields,
that the produce of the several sorts of grains or seeds may appear
distinct. Of the distance between every species. Distances between vines
planted in corn-fields from one another and from the corn; between vines
planted against hedges, walls, or espaliers, and anything sowed near
them. Various cases relating to vineyards planted near any forbidden
seeds.

In their seventh, or sabbatical year, in which the produce of all
estates was given up to the poor, one of these regulations is on the
different work which must not be omitted in the sixth year, lest
(because the seventh being devoted to the poor) the produce should be
unfairly diminished, and the public benefit arising from this law be
frustrated. Of whatever is not perennial, and produced that year by the
earth, no money may be made; but what is perennial may be sold.

On priests' tithes, we have a regulation concerning eating the fruits
carried to the place where they are to be separated.

The order _women_ is very copious. A husband is obliged to forbid his
wife to keep a particular man's company before two witnesses. Of the
waters of jealousy by which a suspected woman is to be tried by
drinking, we find ample particulars. The ceremonies of clothing the
accused woman at her trial. Pregnant women, or who suckle, are not
obliged to drink for the rabbins seem to be well convinced of the
effects of the imagination. Of their divorces many are the laws; and
care is taken to particularise bills of divorces written by men in
delirium or dangerously ill. One party of the rabbins will not allow of
any divorce, unless something light was found in the woman's character,
while another (the Pharisees) allow divorces even when a woman has only
been so unfortunate as to suffer her husband's soup to be burnt!

In the order of _damages_, containing rules how to tax the damages done
by man or beast, or other casualties, their distinctions are as nice as
their cases are numerous. What beasts are innocent and what convict. By
the one they mean creatures not naturally used to do mischief in any
particular way; and by