THE FIRST "POPULAR SCIENTIFIC TREATISE." 719 







this idea was once brand-new. At the present time, when the most rec- 

 ondite investigation is summarized and explained for the unscientific, 

 so that what is capable of translation into common speech is discussed 

 at tea-tables within a week after presentation, it is not easy to go 

 back in imagination to a day when the student of Nature worked only 

 for, and was judged only by, a narrow circle of his own, and most 

 gentlemen and gentlewomen were not only completely ignorant of 

 scientific thought and method, but would have felt in danger of ac- 

 quiring pedantry in learning them. Such, however, was the state of 

 things two hundred years ago in the then most cultivated society of 

 Europe ; and it was to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle that first pre- 

 sented itself the audaciously novel conception of writing a .book 

 which should render some of the results of science into a language 

 comprehensible by the most fashionably ignorant, and in a style which 

 should make science itself recognized as a permissible topic of dis- 

 cussion in the salons. 



His happy thought was executed with a cleverness akin to genius : 

 the book went into all languages, -and is said to have been reprinted a 

 hundred times during the last century. " Conversations on the Plu- 

 rality of Worlds " was its title ; and though it is by no means rare, and 

 indeed remains a classic in its kind, it is probably nowadays known 

 only by name to the majority of English readers. Yet, in its way, 

 nothing better has been done since, or rather its way is one which has 

 had no entirely successful imitator among all its numerous progeny. 

 It will be interesting, then, to look at this original in a path since so 

 well trodden, and in doing so it may be premised that the book ap- 

 peared in 1686, and was addressed to such a circle of readers as then 

 only French society and the court of Louis XIV. could furnish. The 

 age of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, La Bruyere, La Rochefoucauld ^ 

 and St.-Simon, Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue (and it might be 

 added of Fontenelle himself), was certainly not devoid of literary 

 culture, and yet that very culture had so completely excluded science 

 that we shall presently see the marchioness, w T ho is presented to us as 

 a type of accomplished elegance, expressing complete astonishment 

 at hearing that the earth turns round, and the most naive wonder at 

 the idea that her park and castle, and she herself, are actually turning 

 too ! 



The " Conversations "are introduced with a description of a moon- 

 light night in the park, where the author is walking with the mar- 

 chioness, to whom he is paying his court, with the accompaniment of 

 perpetual and somewhat insipid compliment, which seems to have been 

 a part of the conversational dress of the time, and to have belonged 

 to the fashion of the period as much as its lace-covered waistcoats. 



The talk is first of the beauty of the night, and moves on in an 

 easy and natural tone, till the author casually speaks of the stars they 

 are contemplating as "these worlds." The lady asks for an explana- 



