I have restricted myself to the means of ventilation, which is requisite at all seasons of the year, but am quite aware that warmth, or a temperature above that of the external air, is sometimes indispensable to health and comfort, and therefore to the free exercise of the faculties. I believe, however, that the means proposed for the admission of fresh air might also be made available for the admission of heated air, and that either description of air might be admitted independently of the other, or both descriptions simultaneously.
A vast increase of reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, and school-rooms, may be safely predicted, and as the due ventilation of such rooms is a project of undeniable importance, I hope this note, eccentric in form, but earnest as to its purpose, may invite the remarks of others more conversant with architecture and physics—either in correction, or confirmation, or extension, of its general principles and details.
Bolton Corney.
The Terrace, Barnes,
28th April, 1854.
THE HOUSE OF RUSSELL, OR DU ROZEL.
At a time when the readers of "N. & Q.," and the world at large, have been hearing of the gift of a bell to a village church in Normandy, so pleasantly and readily made by the princely house of Russell, far exceeding the modest solicitation of the curé for assistance by way of a subscription, in remembrance of the Du Rozels having left their native patrimony in France to share the fortunes of the Conqueror in Old England, the following particulars may not be uninteresting.
Mr. Wiffen, when compiling his elaborate Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell, from the Time of the Norman Conquest, had occasion to make some inquiries respecting a statement put forth by a M. Richard Seguin, a rich dealer in merceries and wooden shoes at Vire, in the department of Calvados; who, it appears, had a mania for appropriating the literary labours of others as his own, and, in fact, is stigmatised as a voleur littéraire by M. Quérard, in his curious work entitled Les Supercheries Littéraires Dévoilées. Mr. Wiffen wished to ascertain M. Seguin's authority for affirming in some work, the name of which is not given by M. Quérard, but which is probably the Histoire du Pays d'Auge et des Evêques Comtes de Lisieux, Vire, 1832, that the Du Rozels were descended from Bertrand de Briquebec. M. Seguin's reply is contained in the following letter from M. Le Normand of Vire, to whom Mr. Wiffen had written, requesting him to obtain M. Seguin's authority for his statement:
"J'ai vu M. Séguin, et je lui ai demandé d'où provenaient les renseignements dont il s'était servi pour dire dans son ouvrage que les Du Rozel descendaient des Bertrand de Bricquebec. Il m'a répondu qu'il l'ignorait; qu'il avait eu en sa possession une grande quantité de Copies de Chartres et d'anciens titres qui lui avaient fourni les matériaux de son histoire, mais qu'il ne savait nullement d'où elles provenaient."—Historical Memoirs, &c., vol. i. p. 5. n. 1.
The fact appears to be, that M. Seguin had obtained possession, through marriage, of a quantity of MSS., and was in the habit of printing them as his own works. Some of them had belonged to an Abbé Lefranc, one of the priests who were murdered in the diabolical massacre of the clergy in the prisons of Paris in September, 1792; and others of the MSS. had been the property of a M. Noël Deshayes, Curé de Compigni, whose Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire des Evêques de Lisieux, were published by Seguin as his own, but altered and disfigured under the title of—