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MEZERAY MEZQUITE 487 MEZERAY, Francois Endes de, a French his- torian, horn at Ry, near Argentan, in 1610, died in Paris, July 10, 1683. He served for two campaigns as commissary in the army, after which he wrote his Histoire de France (3 vols., 1643-'51). He received from the king the title of historiographer royal, and a pen- sion of 4,000 livres, which he forfeited in 1668 hy publishing an abridgment of his His- toire containing severe reflections on French taxation. He was also elected a member of the French academy, and in 1675 its perpetual secretary. His history of France has been continued down to 1830 (Paris, 1839). MEZIERES, a fortified town of France, cap- ital of the department of Ardennes, on a pen- insula formed by the confluence of the Meuse and Vence, and on a branch of the Eastern railway, 125 m. N. E. of Paris ; pop. in 1866, 5,818. It has an arsenal, an important maga- zine, and manufactories of powder and marine projectiles. In the Franco-German war it ca- pitulated in January, 1871. MEZIERES, Alfred, a French author, born at Rehon, department of the Moselle, Nov. 19, 1826. Like his father, Louis Mezieres (born in Paris, Nov. 28, 1793), he has distinguished himself by his writings on English and Italian literature, and he has been since 1864 profes- sor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. On Jan. 29, 1874, he was elected to the French academy. His Predecesseurs et contemporaines de Shakespeare obtained a Montyon prize in 1864, and his Petrarque, written from new documents, received one in 1868. In 1873 appeared his Goethe, Us ceuvres expliquees par la me : Dernieres annees. MEZQUITE (Aztec, mizquitl), the Mexican name for prosopis glandulosa, which was for- merly placed in the genus algarobia, a tree of the mimosa suborder of the leguminosa. The mezquite seldom grows more than 30 or 40 ft. high, and when well developed has a rounded head ; but owing to the injuries caused by insects and the parasitic mistletoe, the trunk and branches are frequently irreg- ular and distorted. In its foliage it great- ly resembles the honey locust (GleditscMa), having usually twice-pinnate leaves, which are glandular where the leaflets join the com- mon petiole, and have a pair of strong spines at their insertion upon the stem ; the leaflets are narrow, somewhat curved, and an inch or more in length ; the small greenish-yellow flowers are crowded in dense axillary spikes 3 to 4 in. long; the pod or bean is 6 in. or more in length, straight or curved, com- pressed, and somewhat constricted between the numerous seeds. The tree has a wide range, being found as far north as the Canadi- an river and extending far south into Mexico ; it makes its appearance a short distance from the coast in western Texas, and is the most abundant tree as far westward as the Colora- do and the gulf of California; it is exceed- ingly variable, sometimes appearing as a large shrub forming dense thickets, which from the abundance of spines are impassable, and at other times growing singly with well devel- oped heads, and when viewed from a distance appearing like an apple orchard, so uniform are the trees in size. Were it not for the mez- quite, large tracts in Arizona and northern Mexico would present still greater difficulties to the traveller than they do, as this tree there affords the sole supply of fuel and forage. The wood is very hard, fine-grained, dark red- dish brown in the heart wood, and is some- times used by the Mexicans for furniture, but it is difficult to get pieces large enough to be valuable for lumber ; its durability is probably not inferior to that of the locust. As fuel the mezquite has no superior; it makes a hard sonorous coal, a fire of which is almost a& intense as one of anthracite ; travellers across the desert country where it abounds rely upon it for fuel, the roots being found almost Mezquite (Prosopis glandulosa). everywhere ; where frequent fires destroy the trees the roots remain untouched, throw up a yearly growth of small stems, and thus con- tinue to increase in size, while the growth above ground is destroyed every year or two ; it very often happens that a clump of bushes with stems only an inch or two in diameter will lead to the unearthing of roots as large as one's leg. At a profitable silver mine in the state of Chihuahua, visited by the writer sev- eral years ago, the smelting of the ore was effected entirely with mezquite roots as fuel. The pods, or beans as they are generally called, at a certain state of maturity contain a sugary pulp, which often has a very pleasant flavor, and when quite ripe is mealy, dry, and highly saccharine, but with a mawkish taste that is to most persons disagreeable, though the Mexicans and Indians are fond of it ; the dried pods are beaten in a mortar, and when the seeds and other matters are separated by